Follow Response Advances the State of the Calendar Art

It’s genuinely difficult to find innovation in calendaring. After so many years of so many people working on developing features to make user and shared calendars as productive as possible, it’s seldom that a new capability appears that makes people sit up and take notice. I think that the Follow option (MC786325, 26 April 2024, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 154557) is in that category, especially for those with heavily-scheduled calendars. The option rolled out to targeted release tenants in late April 2024. General availability is expected to start in mid-June 2024 and complete by the end of July 2024.

The Follow option is available when responding to meeting requests in OWA, the Monarch client, and Teams. The option is not currently available in Outlook classic (Windows or Mac) or Outlook mobile. If meeting organizers use Outlook classic, they see Follow responses as tentative. This problem will disappear after Microsoft upgrades Outlook classic to support Follow responses, as I hope they do soon.

Essentially, instead of accepting or declining a meeting, a meeting participant can indicate that they are interested in the meeting content and want to stay informed, even if they can’t attend in person or online.

Meeting Artefacts Core Underpinning for Follow Responses

Follow is a feature made possible by the preservation of meeting artefacts such as chat, transcribe, meeting recap, and shared files. It’s great that these elements capture what happened during a meeting and are available afterward for review, but until now the items have only been available to meeting participants. If you decline a meeting, you become a non-participant and have zero access.

You can’t respond to every calendar meeting request with Follow. It wouldn’t make sense to Follow a one-to-one meeting because you’re telling the other person that they can go ahead with the meeting but you’re not going to be there. In short, a meeting’s got to have enough participants to happen even if you’re absent.

Two big things happen if you respond to a meeting request with Follow (Figure 1). First, the meeting remains on your calendar. However, your availability is unaffected because a followed meeting does not block out time, meaning that it’s possible to accept another (more important) meeting. Second, you retain access to meeting artefacts.

Meeting Organizers Responsibilities

Obviously, if a meeting organizer receives some Follow responses (Figure 2), it’s a big hint for them to make sure that the meeting is recorded and transcribed. The text shown in the meeting response is part of the meeting body, so it appears in all versions of Outlook, even when a meeting organizer uses Outlook classic and sees a Follow response as tentative.

To remind the organizer what they should do to facilitate those following the meeting, Teams prompts the meeting organizer when they join the meeting to take action to record the proceedings (Figure 3).

I often use Copilot for Microsoft 365 to generate a summary of the key points and action items that I then edit to add emphasis (and correct some of Copilot’s little flaws) before circulating the information via email. Sure, this isn’t the same as making the data available through Teams, but some appreciate getting the quick summary via email.

A Real Improvement

Adding an onsite status for a meeting is another example of where Microsoft is developing the calendar app. It’s a worthy change, but it’s not of the same import as the Follow response. This feature is something to bring to the attention of people who make heavy use of their calendars.

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Preserve Declined Meetings in Calendars to Retain Meeting Notices

Announced in message center notification MC684218 (26 October 2023, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 154056), the ability to enable the preservation of details for declined meetings is now available in the OWA and Outlook Monarch (the “New Outlook”) clients (Figure 1).

The setting is also controllable through the Set-MailboxCalendarConfiguration cmdlet. This command enables saving of declined events for a mailbox:

Set-MailboxCalendarConfiguration -Identity Kim.Akers -PreserveDeclinedMeetings:$true

There’s no organization-wide control to preserve declined meetings. Because it’s an individual choice to keep declined meetings in a calendar, the setting must be enabled for individual mailboxes. However, to enable the setting for all user mailboxes, it’s easy to do this with PowerShell:

[array]$Mbx = Get-ExoMailbox -RecipientTypeDetails UserMailbox -ResultSize Unlimited
ForEach ($M in $Mbx) {
   Set-MailboxCalendarConfiguration -Identity $M.UserPrincipalName -PreserveDeclinedMeetings:$true
}

Enabling any calendar setting for a mailbox isn’t fast but it should be a one-time operation. On the other hand, the setting must be enabled for new mailboxes as they are created.

Why It’s a Good Idea to Preserve Declined Meetings

Ever since the first version of Outlook appeared in 1997, when people decline an incoming meeting, Outlook removes all details of the meeting to keep the calendar clear and not block time that might be needed for another event. This scheme works well but it means that once someone declines an inbound meeting, they have no further knowledge about the meeting even if they have no intention of attending the event. They can forward the meeting invitation to someone else (if meeting settings permit forwarding), review any attachments included with the invitation or access content created during a meeting such as the meeting chat or meeting recap (if it’s a Teams meeting). Alternatively, they can decide to attend the meeting if their schedule clears up.

Preserving declined meetings means that Outlook enters details of an event in an invitee’s calendar but does not block the event time in the user’s free/busy data. This means that the Outlook scheduling assistant regards the slot as available and can be used for other meetings.

As a Microsoft MVP, I receive many meetings organized by Microsoft engineering group to discuss new product details. Some of these events are interesting, but only if I can find time to attend. Having the calendar retain the event details allows me to go back to attend an event when I can.

No Declined Meetings for Outlook Desktop

Outlook desktop doesn’t obey the settings used by OWA and Monarch. Its settings are often implemented in values held in the system registry. Even if its implementation has caused some difficulties, roaming signatures are a good example of how Microsoft is moving Outlook desktop from its PC-centric heritage to cloud settings.

With this in mind, it shouldn’t be a surprise to learn that meetings declined using Outlook desktop are not preserved. Meetings declined using the Outlook for Mac and Outlook mobile clients are preserved, even if their UI doesn’t include the ability to control the setting.

Declined meetings kept in the calendar are the same as any other calendar events (Figure 2). The sole difference is that the event doesn’t occupy a slot in the user’s free/busy data. Because the meetings are calendar events, they show up as normal in all clients and any other application that uses calendar data.

If the user changes their response and accepts the meeting, Outlook updates the calendar event and reserves the time in the user’s free/busy data.

A Change in Habit

Microsoft doesn’t make changes like this without some form of feedback that points out why a new approach is necessary. I don’t know if the input came from customers or from inside Microsoft, but I suspect that the driving factor is the increasing amount of information shared with meeting invitations and added to events during Teams calls. Being able to go direct to the event makes it a lot easier for meeting participants to access the information, even if they choose to decline the invitation to attend.

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Outlook Voice Dictation Supported by Monarch and OWA

Announced in message center notification MC679312 (4 October, 2023, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 171199), the ability to dictate the body text for Outlook messages is now rolling out to all tenants with the intention that Microsoft will complete the deployment in early December 2023.

The title of MC679312 is “Dictation Support Coming to the new Outlook,” which implies that this feature is only for the Monarch client, but message text dictation works for OWA too.

Setting up for Outlook Voice Dictation

The basic idea is that you can turn on a PC microphone when composing a new email and speak instead of writing the message body. Outlook connects to the Microsoft Azure speech-to-text service (hence the need for a “reliable internet connection” to translate words captured by the microphone into text. Transcribing audio to text is well-known within Microsoft 365. It’s the basis for meeting transcription in Teams and video transcripts in Stream.

To begin, make sure that the PC microphone is enabled before creating a new message. When positioned in the message body (voice dictation doesn’t work for the message subject or to select recipients), select the Dictate (blue microphone icon) option and the language you plan to speak in. As Figure 1 shows, Outlook supports a limited set of languages for now with another set in preview. Microsoft Azure speech-to-text can handle “more than 100 languages and variants,” so it’s likely that the set of available languages will expand over time to deal with all languages supported by Outlook.

I was impressed to find Gaeilge (Irish Gaelic) in the list of preview languages (the list of preview languages is much longer than shown in Figure 1).

Switching languages is easy and it’s possible to compose a message in multiple languages, assuming that you have sufficient fluency in the target languages to create passible text. My efforts in Irish were OK but my French accent proved an obstacle that dictation (or the back-end voice processing service) had difficulty with. In any case, it was fun testing out languages.

Composing Messages with Outlook Voice Dictation

After settling on your preferred language, dictation can start. I found that a slight delay occurred between selecting the Dictation option and a beep indicating that the microphone was ready to accept input. Perhaps this is due to the need to connect to the Azure transcription service.

Once connected, composing message text is a matter of speaking normally. Microsoft says that voice dictation is “a quick and easy way to draft emails, send replies, and capture the tone you’re going for.” I’m not sure that dictation is any faster than typing, especially with the help of intelligent editors, but that applies to people with good typing skills. Those who struggle to compose message text might well find it easier to speak and edit the output before sending the message.

Figure 2 shows a message that I composed with voice dictation. You can see that dictation captured double instances of words twice (easily fixed). The output text is very usable if you don’t mumble or say “Uh” too often.

Creating Better Text Output

Microsoft says that Azure transcription has “automatic formatting and punctuation.” Perhaps Outlook doesn’t use this functionality because the text I generated seemed like a real stream of consciousness devoid of punctuation. To have any punctuation, you need to remember to use commands like:

• Full stop.
• Comma.
• New line.
• New paragraph.

I haven’t yet worked out how to insert a quotation or to bold, or underline text. On the other hand, I discovered that the profanity filter works when I swore at my inability to master dictation.

Outlook voice dictation doesn’t seem to use the Azure speech-to-text disfluency removal feature. This cleans up “stutter, duplicate words, and … filler words like uhm or uh” to produce text that reads better.

Dictation only works when the compose message window is active. If you move focus to another application, like switching to a document to check a fact, the connection to Azure drops and dictation stops. The connection also drops if you pause and don’t speak for more than ten seconds (approximately). I can understand why voice dictation works like this. It would be wasteful to persist a connection while waiting for the user to return and produce some more pearls of wisdom. However, it’s something to remember as no one likes to speak into a message without generating text.

Fixing Dictated Text is a Copilot Thing

Being able to rewrite and improve text is one of the benefits advanced for generative AI. I asked Bing Chat Enterprise (BCE, soon to be plain “Copilot”) to add the missing punctation from text generated from speech and then make the text more concise (you could equally use ChatGPT or Bing Chat to do the job). The output was very good and it’s easier to do this than rewriting the raw text. Interacting with BCE required me to copy text to BCE, run the prompt, and paste the amended text (Figure 3) back into the Outlook message.

Using an external generative AI is slightly clunky, but it works and is a lot cheaper than paying $30/month for the fully-integrated Microsoft 365 Copilot. Admittedly, Microsoft 365 Copilot offers many more features and functions and no one would ever buy it simply to improve text. Or would they?

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Microsoft Gives Tenants More Time to Prepare for Roaming Signatures

Announced in MC684213 (26 October 2023), Microsoft is helping customers who struggle with the introduction of roaming signatures for Outlook by allowing them to postpone the implementation in tenants. This is a good idea, but it’s sad that Microsoft has taken so long to sort out what seems to be a reasonably straightforward feature. First promised in summer 2020 (when I noted that signature management is complex), Microsoft’s development of the feature ran into problems and eventually in July 2022, they announced that roaming signatures wouldn’t be available until October 2022. A year later, we’re still struggling to deal with roaming signatures across the Outlook client family.

The background is that OWA stores its signature information as mailbox settings. This implementation makes it easy for administrators to check if mailboxes have signatures configured and if not, make the necessary changes. By comparison, Outlook desktop (for Windows) traditionally stores its signature information in Outlook profiles in the system registry. The implementation goes back to the earliest days of Outlook desktop, now over 25 years old, and is much more difficult to deal with in terms of configuring standard signatures.

The Solution for Roaming Signatures

Microsoft’s solution stores signature information for Outlook clients in a hidden mailbox folder (visible using the MFCMAPI utility). This is a good approach because it means that the same signature information is available to any Outlook client that connects to the mailbox.

However, roaming signatures cause problems for OWA because the Set-MailboxMessageConfiguration cmdlet used to configure the mailbox settings for OWA signatures doesn’t work when a tenant uses roaming signatures. In essence, when roaming signatures are active within a tenant, OWA ignores the settings configured with Set-MailboxMessageConfiguration. That’s unacceptable when customers invest a lot of work to develop PowerShell scripts to manage signatures for users. Naturally, these customers were very unhappy when they discovered that Microsoft introduced a new problem for OWA by addressing the roaming signatures issue for Outlook desktop.

The problem has been known for well over a year at this point and it’s unknown why Microsoft has been so slow to respond. Perhaps it’s an instance of when the solution for a problem has always seemed to be close at hand without ever being attainable.

New Organization Setting to Postpone Roaming Signatures

The latest initiative is that Microsoft has implemented an Exchange Online configuration setting called PostponeRoamingSignaturesUntilLater. If set to True (or 1), Exchange Online disables roaming signatures for OWA and the Monarch client. This means that PowerShell scripts developed to manage OWA signatures with the Set-MailboxMessageConfiguration continue to work.

Set-OrganizationConfig -PostponeRoamingSignaturesUntilLater $true

This setting only affects OWA and Monarch. It has no effect on Outlook desktop clients.

Many tenants can already update this setting in their tenant. Microsoft will complete deployment to all tenants by mid-November 2023. By default, the setting is False, meaning that Outlook desktop clients can use roaming signatures.

Note the PostponeRoamingSignaturesUntilLater name chosen for the setting. This is a postponement. Microsoft plans to make roaming signatures the norm for Exchange Online in the future, once they’ve sorted out the problems that currently make it difficult for OWA to deal with the data stored in the hidden mailbox.

The change gives tenant administrators control over a mess that Microsoft caused. It’s good because previously administrators had to file a support request to have Microsoft disable roaming signatures through some backend process. However, the need for such a

Microsoft says that the only way to disable roaming signatures for Outlook desktop, remains to apply a registry setting.

ISVs and Roaming Signatures

Many third-party signature management solutions are available for Exchange Online. When Microsoft updates how Outlook clients fetch signature data, the change impacts the ISV products. Microsoft says that they are now working to deliver API support for roaming signatures so that ISV products can manage signatures in the mailbox location.

Given the length of time Microsoft has been working on the roaming signatures problem, it’s curious that the API is not already available. But then again, Microsoft’s history of helping ISVs working in this space has been patchy with many issues in the past. I thought things had turned the corner in 2020, but that improvement doesn’t appear to have persisted.

A Hard Computing Problem

I know things are complex anytime you try and work with Outlook desktop. That’s probably one of the reasons why Microsoft is gung-ho to prepare the current client with Monarch. It takes too long to innovate, too long to change the UI, too long to do anything. Even so, it’s hard to understand why developing a new mechanism for roaming signatures can have taken quite so long. I guess it’s one of those hard computing problems!

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When Users Define Their Work Locations, It Helps Others to Schedule Meetings

On May 10 2023, Microsoft published a post titled “Coordination is the key to spontaneity with these features in Outlook on the web and Teams.” That’s quite a mouthful, but essentially it’s about some features Microsoft is introducing in OWA and Teams to help people know where their colleagues are working. The update for OWA to allow users to define their location during work hours started to appear in tenants on May 9. You’ll know if your tenant has the update if you see a Work hours and locations setting in the Calendar section of OWA settings (Figure 1).

I have not yet seen the updates to the OWA calendar to display locations in the scheduling assistant or to adjust the set location when reviewing a calendar event. No doubt the bytes are on their way.

Teams Update to Change or Clear Work Locations

On May 26, Microsoft followed up with message center notification MC561188 to say that the changes in Teams to allow users to set the work location for a day (Microsoft 365 roadmap item 125375) has started to roll out to targeted release tenants and Teams preview. Standard release tenants can expect to see the functionality starting in early June with full worldwide deployment complete by early August.

Once again, not all the code has shown up yet. The bits to allow users to change their work location for the current day (Figure 2) are present but work locations don’t yet appear on user profile cards alongside the other information to help schedule meetings like someone’s office and local time.

Updating your work location in Teams has no effect on the settings defined in OWA. There is no link between acting to update the work location for the current day and the set of work locations defined for a (default) week.

It’s not unusual for Microsoft 365 code updates to arrive in pieces. Being able to set a work location doesn’t depend on the user profile card and vice versa, so Microsoft can deploy the code at different times. Unless you’re expecting something to be present, you won’t notice that anything’s awry.

Restricted Work Locations

Nice as the idea of helping colleagues know where someone is when arranging meetings, the implementation is limited by the choice between two locations. You can’t add a third location, and you can’t rename the locations (for example, from “Remote” to “Home Office”). It would be nice if OWA settings supported more flexibility in managing work locations. In addition, there’s no word if Outlook desktop or Outlook mobile will support work locations.

There’s also no way for an administrator to block the work locations feature or to set it for users. Public availability of a way to set a new feature in a user’s calendar through a cmdlet like Set-MailboxCalendarConfiguration normally appears a few months after it is introduced.

Which brings me to the point that the most important way to inform co-workers about your working arrangements is to make intelligent use of the Teams status message. Update your status message daily to let people know important details about how to contact you and where you’re located and you’ll find that the work location feature is a lot less important (and useful) than it first seems. You could even exploit the pronoun support in Teams to insert a 30-character message to make people aware of your current status and use the more expansive text available in the status message for precise details of how and when you can be contacted.

Synchronization is Important

It’s good that OWA and Teams are synchronizing the introduction of new features. The unfortunate thing is that the current implementation of the work locations feature is really not all that useful. Perhaps this will change in time. Let’s hope that this happens.

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Intelligent Technology Depends on Machine Learning Access to User Data

Some years ago, I wrote about how Outlook uses machine learning to predict words to insert in messages. This was an early example of machine learning in Outlook. Text prediction is common practice today and we almost expect applications to include machine learning to help us compose notes, documents, and responses. Given the introduction of ChatGPT and Bing’s AI Bot, some worry about the prospect of increasing amounts of machine-generated text and its effect on human creativeness. It’s definitely a story to follow.

Over the last few years, Microsoft has steadily increased the use of “intelligent technology” in Outlook. Currently, the range of features covers features like birthday detection to text predictions to suggested replies, controlled through OWA settings (Figure 1). Regretfully, the Set-MailboxMessageConfiguration cmdlet doesn’t currently support updating these settings for a mailbox.

The combination of Microsoft Research and product engineering groups has driven the introduction of intelligent technology in OWA. For example, Outlook’s suggested replies feature is underpinned by the Azure Machine Learning Service.

Outlook Desktop Lags in Intelligence

Outlook desktop clients receive the intelligent technology features after OWA. This lag has always existed, but at least we can respond to email with an emoji. Oddly, there’s been a few recent reports of Outlook for Windows failing to display the “show text predictions while typing” setting in its options (here’s an example). I don’t see the setting on one PC and do on another, both of which run the same build of Outlook click to run. I even updated the system registry at HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\MailSettings to set the InlineTextPrediction DWORD value to 1 to enable text predictions with no effect.

Microsoft Processing of User Data

One thing that people get worried about is the notion that Microsoft “reads” their email to create suggested replies and to build models for text predictions. It’s true that Microsoft processes email to create the suggestions and predictions used by Outlook, but the important thing is that the data used by the learning models constructed to help machine learning understand how individual users work with text remain in user mailboxes. Microsoft doesn’t gather information from the 380-odd million active Office 365 users to improve its detection algorithms. The general foundation for the models come from public data (and I imagine, messages circulating within Microsoft), but the tweaks to make those models personal remain private to the user.

In its user documentation for suggested replies, Microsoft says that “Suggested replies are generated by a computer algorithm and use natural language processing and machine learning technologies to provide response options.” It also says that “Outlook uses a machine learning model to continually improve the accuracy of the suggestions. This model runs on the same servers as your mailbox within your organization. No message content is transmitted or stored outside of your organization.”

These statements don’t mean that the machine learning code runs on 300K Exchange Online mailbox servers. Instead, Microsoft uses a concept called Privacy Preserving Machine Learning (PPML) to transfer data to specialized AI computers in the Microsoft cloud. After processing, Microsoft erases the source information from the AI computers and background agents update mailboxes with user-specific results. It is this information that Outlook consumes locally when dealing with messages.

Email is worldwide, but the structures and syntax used by different languages means that Microsoft’s machine learning processes is limited to certain languages. For instance, at the time of writing, suggested replies are available in only 22 languages.

I’ve heard (but can cite no public evidence) that AI processing occurs on a tenant basis to allow some consolidation of generic results at the tenant level. For instance, if many users in a tenant use “OK” as a standard response, it’s likely that machine learning will consider “OK” as a prime candidate to be a suggested response for everyone in that tenant. The consolidated generic data remains in the tenant.

Viva Insights Processes User Email Too

In addition to the way Microsoft processes user email to understand text patterns, Viva Insights looks through email to detect commitments made by users. Its MyAnalytics predecessor started to scan emails for commitments in 2018. When users open the Viva Insights add-in or use the Viva Insights app in Teams, they see recommendations and insights derived from the contents of the calendar and inbox folders from their mailbox.

Among the information Viva Insights highlights are messages that might contain commitments that the user needs to follow up. Viva Insights displays details of the messages it has found and prompts the users to either note the potential task as complete or add it as a personal To Do task (Figure 2).

Viva Insights also finds messages where the user asks recipients to do something and prompts them to either follow up or mark the task as done.

There’s lots of deep research into finding commitments in email and highlighting those commitments to users. But again, the important thing is that the data used by Viva Insights remains in user mailboxes and is under the control of users.

Worrying About the Data Used by Machine Learning in Outlook

Those with responsibility for compliance and privacy in an organization are usually the people most worried about the processing of user data. With the growth of machine learning and AI-powered “experiences” and the resultant need for access to user data to learn from, this is a good concern to have. In the case of Microsoft 365, many “connected experiences” exist where people consume a cloud service without realizing where data comes from or is consumed.

Personally, I’m not concerned about how machine learning processes my email as the outcome is useful (when it works), but I realize that others have different feelings. It’s a topic for every organization to work through and figure out how happy they are to have Microsoft process their data to create new features.

To finish off, Figure 3 shows how Bing chat answered my question about how Outlook uses machine learning…

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Users Can Decide What Pronoun to Display in Profile Card

Updated March 30, 2023

Announced in message center notification MC515531 (last updated 21 February 2023), the ability to enable pronouns in Microsoft 365 profile cards is available in the Microsoft 365 admin center. Once enabled, users can set their preferred Microsoft 365 pronouns using the preview version of Teams. The pronoun feature is covered by Microsoft 365 roadmap item 86352 (Teams) and 115511 (OWA).

I have been able to update pronouns in Teams, OWA, and the latest build of the Monarch (“One Outlook”) client.

Employee Engagement

Microsoft’s documentation for the pronoun feature says that “the simple act of using the right pronouns for one another can help build trust and improve communication among colleagues.” Microsoft goes on to highlight that “Whether or not to share or publicly display pronouns is always up to an individual. Pronouns should never be assigned to one person by another person. It should be up to the person using them to decide when, where, and which pronouns are used – including whether to use this feature.”

In other words, organizations should do some thinking and employee engagement before they implement pronouns for profile cards.

Implementing Pronouns on the Microsoft 365 Profile Card

The first step is to enable pronouns for the organization. Go to Org settings in the Microsoft 365 admin center and select the Security & privacy tab. Pronouns is one of the listed options (Figure 1).

Microsoft says that it can take up to 7 hours before users can change their pronouns. In practice, expect the change to take a day before it is effective. If you disable pronouns, it will take the same length of time before pronouns disappear from view for all users. Microsoft 365 removes pronoun data if an organization disables the feature. Like most deletions in Microsoft 365, deletion is not immediate and if you reenable pronouns, previously set values will reappear.

After the software change is effective, users will see the option to update pronouns on their profile card. For instance, I clicked on my photo for a message posted to a Teams channel to reveal my profile card and see the option to add pronouns (Figure 2).

Remember Microsoft’s point that pronouns are a personal decision for users? To enable freedom of choice, you can add whatever text you like for a pronoun. The profile card suggests the commonly-used values such as “She/Her,” but you can ignore these values and use whatever text you prefer (up to 30 characters).

The important thing to remember is that pronouns are visible to all members of the organization. There’s no way to restrict pronoun display to a certain segment, such as members of a group. Guest members and external members of shared channels can’t see pronoun information on profile cards.

Building the Profile Card

Microsoft 365 stores user pronouns in a hidden folder in user Exchange Online mailboxes. Apps that support the profile card retrieve the information from the mailbox along with other properties (including custom attributes) to display the profile card (Figure 4).

A Change to Plan

Microsoft’s FAQ for pronouns contains some other useful information to consult before implementation. Displaying pronouns in the profile card is obviously something that an organization should think through before implementation. For example, some organizations also add pronouns to account display names, meaning that the information shows up in address books and other places where people see display names, like email headers, listings of documents in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, and so on. Don’t rush to deploy just because someone (maybe a vocal proponent) thinks that pronouns are a good idea. Pause, consider, and then decide.

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Email Signatures Shared between Outlook and OWA But Not a Panacea for Signature Management

A reader pointed me to Microsoft’s Email Signature Gallery and asked if these signatures could be used with Outlook and OWA. The answer is yes, and there’s documentation to show how, which is always nice.

The gallery of email signatures is in a Word document (Figure 1), which can be downloaded or edited online. Editing is important as you need to update one of the sample signatures to use it.

After making the appropriate changes, you can cut and paste the signature into OWA or Outlook desktop (Figure 2) and the wonders of roaming signatures will make it available in both clients. Basically, all you need to do is replace the photo, update the values for title, phone numbers, organization, and address, and add links for your web site and Twitter handle. The email signatures gallery sounds like a very useful tool, but some downsides exist.

According to message center notification MC450845 (October 27, 2022), rollout of roaming signatures should now be complete. Microsoft also refers to the feature as “cloud signatures.” Both mean the same thing. The signature information is in user mailboxes and clients download signature information from the mailbox to apply signatures to messages.

Set-MailboxMessageConfiguration Remains Broken

The first issue is that Microsoft hasn’t addressed the issue with roaming signatures that broke the Set-MailboxMessageConfiguration cmdlet by removing HTML support for signatures in OWA. Microsoft removed the warning from the documentation that roaming signatures causes the problem, which was nice of them. The problem means that if you’ve taken the time to develop nicely-formatted signatures for OWA, any scripts that apply OWA signatures to mailboxes won’t work.

You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs and Microsoft would say that you can’t introduce roaming signatures and give users a choice of signatures to use without breaking something. At least, I think they’d say this because they broke something.

It’s reasonable to assume that an update would be necessary for the Set-MailboxMessageConfiguration cmdlet after the introduction of roaming signatures. The update needs to:

• Support the storage of signature information in the user’s mailbox.
• Support reading and setting of multiple signatures per mailbox.
• Support selecting a default signature for new messages and replies from the available set.

It would be nice if Microsoft fixed the cmdlet problem so that those who’ve invested time and energy to develop PowerShell scripts to manage email signatures can continue to benefit from their work.

Roaming Signature Data in User Mailboxes

Up to now, the cmdlet could retrieve signature information from its settings. Now it must read data from the ApplicationDateRoot\49499048-0129-47f5-b95e-f9d315b861a folder in the non-IPM part of the mailbox. The MFCMAPI utility reveals that each signature has its own sub-folder (Figure 3) along with other information stored in ApplicationDateRoot\49499048-0129-47f5-b95e-f9d315b861.

The folder for a signature has a contents table storing some message items. The message items hold the signature data (Figure 4) in HTML format, including graphic elements like icons.

It’s obvious that the implementation of roaming signatures is very different in many ways to the simplicity of the earlier approach taken by OWA, which only supports a single HTML signature.

Roaming Signatures Work for OWA

In any case, signatures updated in Outlook desktop become available to OWA (and vice versa) after a period for the clients to learn about updates and refresh caches. Figure 5 shows the signature from the email signatures gallery that I pasted into Outlook as it appears in an OWA message.

Current State of Play

The current state of play is therefore that clients that support roaming signatures (OWA, the Monarch client, and the latest Outlook click to run builds) share signatures stored in user mailboxes. No matter what client someone updates a signature in or the source of the signature (from the gallery, from another user, or generated by the user), the clients will all pick up and use that signature.

Does this mean that ISV signature management products like Code Two’s Email Signatures for Office 365 are out of business? Not at all. Roaming signatures fix a problem in that a common signature is now available within the Outlook client family. It’s not a universal panacea for email signature management and does nothing about making sure that people use suitable corporate signatures throughout the organization, including with non-Outlook clients. If you’re interested in central management of email signatures across multiple clients, there’s still a ton of value to be gained from investing in the right tools.

So much change, all the time. It’s a challenge to stay abreast of all the updates Microsoft makes across Office 365. Subscribe to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook to receive monthly insights into what happens, why it happens, and what new features and capabilities mean for your tenant.

This One Outlook Build is Worthwhile

Updated 13 March 2023

In May 2022, a leaked build of Microsoft’s new One Outlook (“Monarch”) client emerged. A week or so later, Microsoft made an official beta available to members of the Office Insiders Beta Channel. At the time, I called Monarch a slightly prettier version of the OWA client available for Exchange Online, albeit one that missed important functionality.

A refreshed Monarch client is now available to all Office Insiders. Based on working with the new Monarch for a couple of days (and years of Outlook), it’s still a slightly prettier client. The big difference is that the new build is usable for real-life day-to-day work, especially if your preference is to use OWA rather than desktop Outlook.

Update: According to message center notification MC526128 (11 March 2023), users of the Current Channel for Microsoft 365 apps for enterprise will be able to try out the new client in early April, while those who use the Monthly Enterprise Channel will see it in May.

New Features Highlighted by Microsoft

This isn’t because of the features touted by Microsoft. I use Monarch with a Microsoft 365 account, not a Microsoft consumer account (OWA is more than sufficient to deal with my consumer email). The current build is still limited to a single account, but Microsoft says that support for multiple accounts is coming. I don’t use Quick Steps because my triage of email is simple: read and keep or delete immediately. And while I like the way that calendar gives the current day more space in calendar views, I couldn’t adjust the column width as promised. Every attempt resulted in Monarch trying to create a new event. Maybe it’s just me.

I did like the ability to customize the ribbon bar (Figure 1), if only because I could get rid of the button to move items to the dead-end street called the Archive folder. I’m not sure I think of the ribbon as having a sleeker look and feel, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Keeping Features

As you might expect, features that appeared in the previous build are still there. This includes support for Loop components, which didn’t appear in OWA and Monarch for some time after Microsoft issued the original beta. The same oddities appear with the Loop implementation, including adding the sender as a Cc recipient for messages and setting the sharing link for the Loop component to be read-only (Figure 2) if that’s what’s defined for files and folders in the organization sharing policy.

Sending out read-only sharing links makes little sense when email is used as a vehicle for collaboration, and it’s surely possible for Microsoft to come up with a way to allow organizations to implement a different sharing link policy for loop components used in OWA, Outlook for Windows, and Teams chat.

Microsoft’s blog post refers to the “new Outlook calendar board view.” This has been available in OWA since July 2021 after they decided that Outlook Spaces (the Moca project) wouldn’t move forward.

The post also refers to Sweep as a way to “to keep your Outlook inbox tidy.” This is another feature that appeared in OWA and then submerged to have more work done to improve its functionality before reappearing. I rather like Sweep because it’s an easy way to get rid of a lot of messages at one time. Select a sample message (in Figure 3 it’s a missed message notification from Teams) and with one click, the client moves all matching messages to a nominated target folder (Deleted Items is the default).

If you choose to use options other than an immediate move (like keep the latest but move everything else), Exchange Online creates a “sweep rule.” The rules are available in the Mail section of Outlook settings. They can also be seen by running the Get-SweepRule PowerShell cmdlet. Background processes run the sweep rules defined in mailboxes periodically, so don’t expect messages governed by these rules to disappear immediately after delivery.

More Coming

Although OWA users will find it easy to switch to Monarch, offline access remains the big blocking factor for those who might consider switching from Outlook desktop clients. Offline access is on the list of features Microsoft plans to release in the coming months. Even in an always connected world, network outages do happen… and having that offline data to work with can be awfully important.

Keep up to date with developments like the development of One Outlook and the Monarch client by subscribing to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. Our monthly updates make sure that our subscribers understand the most important changes happening across Office 365.

First Step Along the Path in Loopifying Email

Nine months after Loop components first appeared in Teams chat, the same components are available to include in OWA messages (message center notification MC360766, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 93234). The general availability date of June 2022 on the roadmap item is a tad optimistic as tenants configured for targeted release are only just seeing Loop components show up in OWA now. I have not seen Loop components show up in Outlook for Windows, bit according to Microsoft, general availability for Loop components in both OWA and Outlook for Windows is expected in July. That goal seems like quite a stretch.

The concept behind Loop components remains the same as in Teams chat. The author of a message inserts a component and edits its content. The physical instantiation of the component is a fluid file stored in the Attachments folder in the author’s OneDrive for Business account.

When they access a loop component, message recipients use a web sockets connection to receive changes made by others in almost real-time together with indicators to show where people are actively editing the content and where changes are made. A link in the message points to the file stored in OneDrive for Business and the app displays the content of the file in an inline editable frame.

Implementing Loop for OWA

If you have used Loop components in Teams chat, there’s not a lot to explain about the implementation in OWA. However, I did note a few points of interest:

• When you add a Loop component to a message, OWA adds your email address as a CC recipient. I don’t know why Microsoft does this as all the action does is deliver an unnecessary (and possibly unwanted) copy of the message to your Inbox. Some will like this approach because receiving a copy of the message in their Inbox reminds them that they’ve shared an editable component with others, but I think it’s a poor implementation. If you need to update a Loop component in a message you send, find the copy of the message in the Sent Items folder, and edit the component there. Alternatively, open and update the fluid file stored in OneDrive for Business.
• Despite Microsoft positioning Loop components as a new way to collaborate, OWA sets the Loop components in emails to allow read-only access to recipients in the same organization. This is dictated by the Files and Folders Links setting in the SharePoint admin center. That setting is focused on document sharing rather than editable components, and I think a separate setting is probably needed for Loop sharing links. Message authors can change the access to allow recipients to update components they receive in email, but it seems like an unnecessary step.
• You can include multiple Loop components in a single email and mix them with normal text. For instance, you could have a paragraph component as an introduction to a message followed by a task list. Each component has its own fluid file stored in OneDrive for Business. This is different to Teams chat where a Loop component must be the only thing in a message. OWA has always been able to deal with multi-part messages, so this isn’t too surprising.
• You can copy a Loop component from OWA and paste it into another app (only Teams chat for now) and the component is editable in its new location. Changes made in Teams show up in OWA and vice versa. This shouldn’t be surprising because you’re essentially copying the link to the component and pasting it into a different app, but it’s nice that it works so smoothly.

Figure 1 shows a Loop component in a message in the Sent Items folder that was pasted into a Teams chat and updated there.

For Now, Loop is Focused on Internal Collaboration

Generally, the Loop implementation in OWA does what you expect and is very usable. The big downside for now is that Loop components in OWA messages only work with people inside the same organization. The technical challenges of controlling access to recipients in other Microsoft 365 tenants (including hybrid deployments) and non-Microsoft email servers must be understood and addressed before you’ll see seamless interaction using Loop components for people inside and outside your tenant.

You can add non-tenant addressees to a message containing a Loop component, but when you send the message, OWA detects that the links in the message won’t work and signals the error (Figure 2).

If you go ahead and send anyway, external people will receive messages containing links to Loop components that they won’t be able to open. Sometimes, you might see the kind of message shown in Figure 3, which comes from an Exchange Online system mailbox in the tenant to notify a message sender that some problems occurring in granting access to Loop components in an email.

Given that we’re in the early days of emailed Loop components, I’m sure that the issue seen in Figure 3 is a glitch that Microsoft will soon iron out.

The Need for Client Updates Will Slow Adoption of Loop Components

Unlike Teams, the Outlook clients don’t share a common code base. This is what the One Outlook project aims to achieve, but for now the set of email clients in use ranges from those usually up to date (OWA) to those that often aren’t up to date (Outlook desktop). Even within the same organization, if a recipient uses an email client that’s not “Loop enlightened,” they’ll see a link to the fluid file instead of the fully-rendered content. People can use the link to open and interact with the Loop components, but that’s hardly the intended inline editing experience that Microsoft wants to deliver.

The list of email clients that can’t handle Loop components includes Outlook mobile, any other mobile client (like the Apple mail app), and older Outlook desktop clients. Even after Microsoft updates Outlook desktop, experience proves that it will take a long time before every Outlook client used in an organization can interact with Loop components. Perhaps Microsoft hopes that the existence of Loop components will convince customers to use recent versions of Outlook. If that is the hope, it might be a long shot.

Finally, before rushing to use Loop components, remember that some compliance issues remain unsolved. This is evidence that Loop components are still an unproven and immature collaboration technology, which might remain the case for several years to come.

So much change, all the time. It’s a challenge to stay abreast of all the updates Microsoft makes across Office 365. Subscribe to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook to receive monthly insights into what happens, why it happens, and what new features and capabilities like Loop components mean for your tenant.

Change Reflects Increasing Importance of Web Apps

In a move that will be very popular with users, Microsoft announced a new account switcher for Microsoft 365 web apps in message center notification MC338712 on March 4. This is Microsoft 365 roadmap item 70801 and it’s due to land in tenants starting in early April, with deployment due to finish in late June.

Although Microsoft 365 users do a lot of work using desktop clients like Outlook and Teams, there’s no denying that browser clients have become increasingly important. Anyone who does administrative work with Microsoft 365 is probably signed into a bunch of different administrative portals like the:

• Microsoft 365 admin center.
• Microsoft 365 Defender portal.
• Microsoft 365 compliance center.
• Microsoft 365 security center.
• Azure AD admin center.
• Azure portal.
• Teams admin center.
• SharePoint Online (and OneDrive for Business) admin center.
• Microsoft Intune portal.

At the same time, many Microsoft 365 apps don’t have desktop clients, including SharePoint Online, Planner, Yammer, Bookings, OneDrive for Business, Delve, Stream, Power Automate, Forms, and Lists. Some apps behave perfectly well when installed as a desktop app (which is how I use OneDrive for Business, Planner, Yammer, Lists, and several SharePoint Online sites), but they’re still web pages.

Messy Multiple Browsers

The point is that much of the focus of Microsoft 365 activity is through the browser, so we all end up with multiple open browser apps or a browser cluttered with open tabs. This isn’t so bad until you complicate matters by wanting to sign into different tenants or the Microsoft consumer apps). Until now, switching context requires one of:

• Signing out and signing into the desired tenant.
• Using a second browser (or maybe even a third).
• Using private browser sessions.

When guest support for Teams first appeared, switching to use guest access in another tenant was slow and people worked around the problem by running a separate browser for each tenant they wanted to work in. The technique worked, but it’s an example of the lack of flexibility in credential management and data management in Microsoft 365 browser apps.

New Account Switcher

When the update rolls out, you’ll be able to sign into multiple Microsoft 365 tenants and MSA accounts and switch between the different accounts for Microsoft 365 web apps within the same browser session without having to sign out and in again. A new account manager capability (Figure 1) lists the current signed-in sessions and allows the user to “perform a one-click switch” to a chosen session. After an account switch, the app reloads the page using data from the selected account.

Microsoft says that the switch occurs “while maintaining data integrity and privacy across different account/tenant boundaries.” In other words, you can be signed into OWA in two Microsoft 365 tenants but won’t see data from one tenant appear in the other or vice versa.

If a user opens multiple tabs with different accounts, they’ll be told that they recently switched to the most recently opened account and asked to refresh the page to load data from that account.

Not All Apps Supported

The capability isn’t available for all apps. When released, it applies to:

• OWA.
• SharePoint Online browser client.
• OneDrive for Business.
• OneDrive consumer.
• Microsoft 365 admin center.
• Office.com.
• Office web apps.

Microsoft says more Microsoft 365 web apps will be added later. For now, Planner, Yammer, and Teams are the notable absences. Given the work ongoing to create the next generation of the Teams client, Microsoft might not want to add the capability to the current Teams browser client. We shall see in time.

No Admin Impact

User sign outs from browser sessions continue to work as before, as does the ability to block sign-ins and sign an account out of all sessions from the Microsoft 365 admin center. Azure AD continuous access evaluation (CAE) for critical events, which can force users to reauthenticate when events like password changes occur, is likewise unaffected. The only impact on tenant administrators is the opportunity to give some good news to users!

So much change, all the time. It’s a challenge to stay abreast of all the updates Microsoft makes across Office 365. Subscribe to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook to receive monthly insights into what happens, why it happens, and what new features and capabilities mean for your tenant.

No Action Visible

I had a problem with actionable messages generated by Microsoft Teams not working properly in Outlook desktop. In the overall scheme of things, this isn’t a huge issue, but it became an irritation because nothing was obviously wrong. The problem was that I could interact with actionable messages using any other client than Outlook desktop. Here’s the story.

Actionable Messages in Yammer and Teams

Actionable messages contain a JSON payload in the message body to allow the recipient to respond to an application based on the content (hence the name) using “action buttons” associated with the commands necessary to execute an action, like respond to a message. The technology has been available for several years. For example, a Yammer actionable message allows the recipient to react to a message posted to a community or post a response of their own (Figure 1).

Much the same happens for Teams Missed Activity messages, where recipients can respond to chats or channel conversations (Figure 2). Teams generates these messages based on the option selected by the user in the Notifications section of Teams settings.

Apart from the magic involved in interpreting the JSON payload and presenting it in an attractive manner in Outlook desktop, OWA, and Outlook mobile, the other major technology needed is the HTTP response to update the target application with the action chosen by the recipient.

Deploying the Actionable Message Debugger

The problem I had was that Outlook desktop stubbornly refused to allow interaction with Teams missed activity messages while OWA and Outlook mobile worked properly. Instead of being able to reply to Teams conversations from Outlook desktop, the messages offered to use a deeplink to launch the application positioned in the conversation (for instance, Teams missed activity messages included only a Reply in Teams button). Although Teams actionable messages had problems, Yammer actionable messages worked normally.

I found a mention of a similar problem happening in another context. Unfortunately, the recommended check against the system registry to uncover permission issues with the Office add-in store produced no joy. However, it led me to install the Actionable Messages Debugger for Outlook and deploy it as an integrated app via the Microsoft 365 admin center (Figure 3).

Soon afterwards, the debugger showed up in Outlook. I don’t know why, but suddenly things started to work properly. Apparently, the mere presence of the debugger or using the add-in to examine the properties of a message (Figure 4) resolved the problem. Or did it?

I

Of course, software doesn’t work on a whim (or maybe it does, which would explain some oddities observed over the years). Authentication is a more fundamental reason. After all, an actionable message must be capable of posting its command for the magic to work. I had switched my Teams desktop client to another tenant (I have guest accounts in too many tenants; shared channels should help, when they become available).

It’s logical to assume that if Outlook desktop finds that the same account used to connect to Exchange Online is not connected to Teams, it will assume that it cannot process actions and so revert to the Reply to Teams command. If the user takes this option, they must authenticate to access Teams. OWA and Outlook Mobile seem to use connections to the home tenant, so they’re unaffected by switching to other host tenants. The issue doesn’t affect Yammer: its browser client probably works like OWA.

I hate not understanding why features do not work as they should. At least now I have a reasonable explanation and can go and do something more productive.

Debugging Information

You probably will not use the debugger unless you’re developing an Outlook add-in or need to gather information for a support call. The information presented by the debugger will mean a lot to those who understand what the JSON content should look like and how it should behave, but maybe not for others. To demonstrate what you might find, here’s an example of an actionable card error captured by the debugger:

{
-
"ActionableMessageStamping": {
-
"Errors": [
"Adaptive card signature validation failed - Sender of the email does not match sender in the signed card. Originator:78c6dd9c-1fe2-40ba-ae94-19729f11547d, OAMAppName:xxxGroup"
],
"Infos": [ ]
},
   "CardEnabledForMessage": false,
   "ClientName": "Outlook",
   "ClientVersion": "16.0.14827.20088",
   "InternetMessageId":           
   "<DB9PR04MB8445D745EBCC517C2CA20D8EFD509@DB9PR04MB8445.eurprd04.prod.outlook.com>",
   "EntityExtractionSuccess": true,
   "SignedAdaptiveCard": true,
-
"MessageCardPayload": {
"found": false,
"type": null
},
-
"AuthHeader": {
"results": "dkim=none (message not signed) header.d=none;dmarc=none action=none header.from=office365itpros.com;",
"authAs": "Internal"
}
}

Organization Control for Actionable Messages

The Exchange Online organization configuration contains a setting (SmtpActionableMessagesEnabled) to control the use of “action buttons.” The default is True, meaning that email clients allow users to respond to buttons inserted in email by Microsoft 365 applications. If you wanted, you can run Set-OrganizationConfig to set the value to False to disable actionable messages.

Set-OrganizationConfig –SmtpActionableMessagesEnabled $False

I can’t think of a good reason to disable actionable messages, but you never know when the need might arise. That’s I can’t think of a good reason to disable actionable messages, but you never know when the need might arise. That’s the joy of discovering poorly documented parts of Microsoft 365, just like finding out why Teams missed activity messages won’t work when you switch to use a guest account in another tenant.

Learn more about how Office 365 really works on an ongoing basis by subscribing to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. Our monthly updates keep subscribers informed about what’s important across the Office 365 ecosystem.

Outlook Groups Still Popular

When Microsoft launched Office 365 Groups in November 2014, the plan was to use these objects to replace distribution groups. Like all plans, events took over and forced change. Distribution groups remain intact (and Microsoft is updating their functionality) and the role of Office 365 Groups (renamed Microsoft 365 Groups in April 2020) has evolved to become a membership and identity service for apps like Teams, Power BI, and Yammer. However, devotees of Outlook can still use Microsoft 365 Groups in Outlook and OWA (where they have the moniker “Outlook Groups”), complete with a dedicated menu bar, presence in Outlook favorites, and section in Outlook resources. Outlook mobile also supports Outlook Groups.

An Outlook group has the following characteristics:

• It hosts email-based discussions between group members (optionally, you can allow non-members to email the group).
• The group appears in Exchange address lists, like the GAL and OAB (Teams hides the Microsoft 365 Groups it uses from Exchange address lists).

Like other Microsoft 365 Groups, an Outlook group has a SharePoint Online team site, shared OneNote notebook, and can connect to Planner.

Subscribers and Copies

An Outlook groups distribute copies of messages sent to the group based on its subscriber list. The AutoSubscribeNewMembers group setting controls if Exchange adds new group members to the subscriber list automatically. Another setting called AlwaysSubscribeMembersToCalendarEvents controls if group members receive copies of calendar events (sometimes it’s necessary to update the groups used by Teams to change these settings).

Users can control if they want to be on a group’s subscriber list with the Follow in Inbox feature. Figure 1 shows the Outlook desktop settings; OWA presents the settings differently, but the same effect applies. In this instance, I am not a subscriber to the group because I don’t receive all email and events. However, I do receive copies of any replies posted to messages I send to the group.

Senders and Copies

In 2017, Microsoft changed the way Groups processed email when it delivered copies to subscribers to stop delivering a copy to the message sender for new messages and replies. On the surface, the change was reasonable because senders have copies of messages in their Sent Items folder and senders can always add themselves as a CC or BCC recipient if they want Exchange to deliver a copy of a specific message to their inbox. Well-intentioned as the change was, it upset many people who liked receiving a copy of anything they posted to groups.

InA few months ago, Microsoft introduced a way to allow users to receive copies of their messages posted to Outlook groups. The requirements are:

• The user or an Exchange administrator must update their mailbox settings to set EchoGroupMessageBackToSubscribedSender to True. As the name implies, the setting controls if the Exchange transport service echoes messages sent to a group by a subscribed sender. By default, this setting is False.
• The user must subscribe to each group for which they wish to receive copies of their posted messages.

I can’t find any message center notification covering the use of the EchoGroupMessageBackToSubscribedSender setting (it’s entirely possible that I missed it). However, from the “common tasks to manage Microsoft 365 groups” page, I can’t find any other Microsoft reference to the cmdlet except in an October 29 change in GitHub to a page covering Hybrid deployment. Other references exist elsewhere, such as this August 31 Stack Overflow discussion. It’s curious that Microsoft doesn’t document this capability more thoroughly.

User Updates

User can update their mailbox settings through OWA options. Go to the Groups section and set the Send me a copy of email I send to a group option (Figure 2).

Administrators can do the same by running the Set-MailboxMessageConfiguration cmdlet.

Set-MailboxMessageConfiguration -Identity Kim.Akers -EchoGroupMessageBackToSubscribedSender $True

In either case, the setting covers all Outlook groups and can take up to an hour before the change is effective and Exchange will deliver a copy of any message posted by the user to the groups they subscribe to.

Users can choose if they want to subscribe to group and now have control over if they receive copies of their own messages. I am loathe to recommend that administrators should step in to update subscriber settings on a group-wide basis because it means that you would overwrite the settings for people who have opted out of receiving copies of group email and events. However, a need might arise to make everyone a subscriber and update their mailbox settings to allow them to receive copies of their own messages. If so, this PowerShell works.

# Update group subscriber list with all members and set their mailboxes to receive copies of messages posted to Outlook groups
$Group = Read-Host "What group do you want to update?"
Write-Host "Checking" $Group "..."
$GroupId = (Get-UnifiedGroup -Identity $Group -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue).ExternalDirectoryObjectId
If (!($GroupId)) { Write-Host "Sorry... we can't find" $Group "... exiting" ; break}
[array]$GroupMembers = Get-UnifiedGroupLinks -Identity $GroupId -LinkType Member
Write-Host "Adding group members as subscribers to" $Group
Add-UnifiedGroupLinks -Identity $GroupId -LinkType Subscriber -Links $GroupMembers.PrimarySmtpAddress
Write-Host "Updating mailbox settings for group members to allow them to receive copies of their messages posted to the group"
$GroupMembers | ForEach-Object { Set-MailboxMessageConfiguration -Identity $_.ExternalDirectoryObjectId -EchoGroupMessageBackToSubscribedSender $True }

One interesting thing about this code is that you do not need to call Add-UnifiedGroupLinks to add each group member to the subscriber list. If you have an array of members, which we do after calling Get-UnifiedGroupLinks to fetch the member list, you can use that as the input and Add-UnifiedGroupLinks will multiple members with one call.

More Updates for Groups

In closing, let me note two other changes coming soon to Outlook Groups. First, MC302487 (December 8) says that users assigned the Send As permission for a group will no longer have to select the group name when sending messages from the group. This change applies to OWA only and roll-out begins in mid-January. Second, MC303512 (December 10) brings equally important news that instead of displaying a folder icon for an Outlook group, OWA will use the Groups icon from mid-December (this change hasn’t turned up in my targeted release tenant yet). I’m sure the new icon will make all the difference.

Learn more about how Office 365 really works on an ongoing basis by subscribing to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. Our monthly updates keep subscribers informed about what’s important across the Office 365 ecosystem.

Read Receipts Is a Very Old Email Feature

I haven’t thought about email read receipts for years. It’s a very old email feature that goes back to the days when unreliable SMTP and X.400 connections linked organizations together and you never quite knew if email got through to its destination. The reliability of computer networks today means that read receipts are less important, or maybe it’s just that other communication methods have replaced some email traffic, like Teams. The introduction of read receipts for Teams in early 2020 doesn’t count because the read receipt for chats is more of a “seen” indicator than a message returned to a sender to confirm that an addressee has opened an email (Figure 1).

Helping a Police Chief

Which brings me to a request from an Office 365 for IT Pros reader. Apparently, a police chief is sick and tired that their email sent to some recipients is not being responded to. They want to know when the addressees open the messages he sends. The request was to be able to turn on automatic read receipts for mailboxes and disable the ability of users to change the setting.

Read receipt is a message option, like delivery receipt (confirming the delivery of a message to a mailbox). When set, the read receipt shows up in the message properties as a Disposition-Notification-To header with the return address to receive the read receipt (Figure 2). A blast from the past EHLO blog post from 2011 explains more.

The presence of the Disposition-Notification-To header is what prompts clients to check if they should ignore the request, send the receipt automatically, or ask the user if they’d like to send the receipt. The immediate problem in satisfying the user request is that Exchange Online considers read receipts to be a client-side function. In other words, the action to respond to the sender is invoked when a recipient uses a client to open a message with a read receipt requested. Clients have different settings to control how to respond.

OWA Read Receipt Settings

Take OWA for example. It’s easy to configure the user settings for read receipts through the Message handling section in OWA settings (Figure 3).

There’s also an Exchange Online PowerShell cmdlet to do the job. For instance, let’s assume that we want a set of users to always send read receipts when requested. This code uses the CustomAttribute12 property to hold the value “RR” to indicate that a mailbox should be in the set. We can use a server-side filter to find the mailboxes and call the Set-MailboxMessageConfiguration cmdlet to update the read receipts setting.

# Find mailboxes to update and then update their read receipt setting to always send read receipts
[array]$Mbx = Get-ExoMailbox -RecipientTypeDetails UserMailbox -ResultSize Unlimited -Filter {CustomAttribute12 -eq "RR"}
If ($Mbx.Count -eq 0) {Write-Host "No mailboxes found"; break}
ForEach ($M in $Mbx) {
   Write-Host "Setting mailbox read receipt configuration for" $M.DisplayName
   Set-MailboxMessageConfiguration -Identity $M.UserPrincipalName -ReadReceiptResponse AlwaysSend }

Using RBAC to Remove Read Receipt Settings from OWA

Although administrators can update user mailbox settings to control read receipts, it does nothing to stop users changing the read receipt options through OWA settings. To block that happening, we need to remove the read receipt options from the GUI. Exchange Online has a well-developed role-based access control (RBAC) system to control features available to users. RBAC works through the user role assignment policy set on user mailboxes. These policies enable or disable features by controlling the cmdlets available to users. For instance, I’ve written in the past about how to use RBAC to stop people updating their OWA autosignature.

To stop users changing the read receipt setting, we need to:

• Create a new RBAC role based on the regular set of user options.
• Remove the entry in the role for the cmdlet used to update read receipt settings (Set-MailboxMessageConfiguration).
• Remove the entry in the role for the cmdlet used to fetch add display the read receipt settings (Get-MailboxMessageConfiguration).
• Create a new user role assignment policy containing the roles usually granted to users with the exception that we replace the base options with the edited version which blocks the ability to update the read receipt settings.

All of this sounds complicated, but it’s a system that worked well since its introduction in Exchange 2010. Here’s the PowerShell code to do the work listed above:

New-ManagementRole MyBaseOptions-NoRR -Parent MyBaseOptions

Set-ManagementRoleEntry MyBaseOptions-NoRR\Set-MailboxMessageConfiguration -Parameters ReadReceiptResponse -RemoveParameter

Remove-ManagementRoleEntry MyBaseOptions-NoRR\Get-MailboxMessageConfiguration

New-RoleAssignmentPolicy -Name PolicyWithNoRR -Roles MyContactInformation, MyRetentionPolicies, MyMailSubscriptions, MyTextMessaging, MyVoiceMail, MyDistributionGroupMembership, MyDistributionGroups, MyProfileInformation, MyBaseOptions-NoRR -Description "User Role Assignment Policy to block users updating read receipt settings"

The last thing to do is to assign the user role assignment policy to the mailboxes we want to block. This is done with the Set-Mailbox cmdlet:

Set-Mailbox -Identity Chris.Bishop -RoleAssignmentPolicy PolicyWithNoRR

Thirty minutes or so later, the new policy will take effect. You’ll know that it works if you go to OWA settings and don’t see the options to update the read receipt settings (Figure 4).

To bring the solution together, you can add the Set-Mailbox command to the code described above to update the read receipt setting and assign the user role assignment policy for the set of target mailboxes.

ForEach ($M in $Mbx) {
   Write-Host "Setting mailbox read receipt configuration for" $M.DisplayName
   Set-Mailbox -Identity $M.UserPrincipalName -RoleAssignmentPolicy PolicyWithNoRR
   Set-MailboxMessageConfiguration -Identity $M.UserPrincipalName -ReadReceiptResponse AlwaysSend }

Controlling Read Receipts in Outlook

Our problem is solved if OWA is the sole client in use. Unhappily, that’s probably not the case. Clients like Outlook for Windows, Outlook for Mac, and Outlook mobile might be in use, as might third-party clients. Every client has its own method to control the processing of read receipts. For instance, Figure 5 shows the settings in Outlook for Windows (click to run version).

For historic reasons, most Outlook for Windows settings are stored in the system registry. A check of the settings available in the administrative templates for Outlook reveals that the read receipts are controlled by the receipt response  DWORD value at HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\Options\Mail. The values are:

• 0: Always send a response.
• 1: Never send a response.
• 2: Ask the user before sending a response.

You can update the value manually by editing the registry (Figure 6), which is fine for a test case. In production, you’re likely to use a group policy object (GPO) or other technique to deploy the policy setting to client workstations.

Once the policy is in place, Outlook greys out the options to control read receipts.

Client-Side Feature Dependant on Client-Side Controls

In summary, read receipts are a client-side feature invoked by the presence of the Disposition-Notification-To message header. Because it’s a client-side feature, any attempt to force the client to process read receipts in a particular manner depends on the controls available in a client. We can satisfy the police chief’s request for OWA and Outlook for Windows. I see no way to do this for Outlook mobile and didn’t investigate Outlook for Mac or any of the many other email clients which can connect to Exchange Online using Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), IMAP4, or POP3 (hopefully without using basic authentication). Now you know what you should look for, checking how to deal with other clients is an exercise for the reader!

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Client-Side Completion for a Server Feature Delivered in April 2021

Exchange Online delivered support for sending email from proxy addresses (mailbox aliases) in April 2021. At least, the server-side part of the equation was happy to process messages sent using proxy addresses. It can take a little time for clients to catch up. A proxy address is an SMTP address assigned to a mailbox. Usually, people use the primary SMTP address for all outgoing messages (and the primary address is often the same as their Microsoft 365 sign-in address, or user principal name, so it’s easily remembered). Secondary proxy addresses are used in situations like:

• Mergers and acquisitions: Email addresses like the ones used at an acquired company.
• Life events: Email addresses with previous versions of someone’s name (like a married surname).
• Organizational addresses: Email addresses with functional titles, such as a departmental manager.

Exchange Online can deliver email addressed to any proxy address to the mailbox.

Supposed to Happen in May

MC252942 (published April 27) announced that OWA would support sending from proxy addresses in early May. Well, that didn’t happen, which was surprising because OWA is usually at the forefront of delivering new features for Exchange Online. Being able to develop and publish new functionality more quickly than Outlook desktop can is one of the reasons why OWA is core to Microsoft’s One Outlook initiative.

Microsoft 365 roadmap item 59437 describes the feature as “rolling out” starting in August. I haven’t seen the new setting appear until this week, so it’s possible that its deployment is still in progress.

OWA Option to Select Proxies

It was possible to send email previously with OWA using a proxy address by typing the proxy address in the From field in the new message screen. However, people often don’t know what proxy addresses are available to them, so while OWA could send messages from proxies, it wasn’t as easy as it could be. This has now been addressed with the arrival a new setting in OWA options to allow users to choose the set of proxy addresses they would like to use (Figure 1).

The address at the top of the list is the primary SMTP address for the mailbox. In my case, it appeared twice (a bug). A user can’t unselect their primary SMTP address as it remains the default for sending. If they want to use a different primary address, they’ll have to ask an administrator to update their account. It’s good practice to make the previous primary address a secondary proxy to ensure that Exchange Online can deliver responses or new messages sent to that address.

It’s wise to check the Always show From option in OWA settings as this will make it easier to select one of the chosen proxies.

Sending From a Proxy

Once you’ve selected the set of proxy addresses that you’d like to use (and made sure that the From field is exposed), it’s easy to select a proxy to use because OWA shows the available set in a drop-down list (exposed by clicking the From button) in the compose message screen. The list (Figure 2) includes:

• The primary SMTP address for the mailbox (the default).
• The proxy addresses selected in OWA options.
• Other addresses previously used to send email. Typically, these are addresses for other user and shared mailboxes where the user has Send As or Send on Behalf of permission.
• The option to add another email address (for instance, for a mailbox you’ve just been given the permission to send from).

Select the proxy to use and compose the message as normal. When Exchange Online sends the message, it populates the From and Return-Path values in the message header (Figure 3).

Small Changes Make a Difference

There’s nothing earthshattering in this update. The Exchange transport system has always been able to deliver email addressed to any valid proxy address assigned to a mailbox. The heavy lifting occurred in April when Exchange Server updated transport to allow it to accept messages sent from proxy addresses. It’s nice that OWA is making it easier for people to use the feature.

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Artificial Intelligence at its Finest

In message center MC281368 (August 27), Microsoft announced the introduction of “tone detection” as a new capability within the Microsoft Editor component in OWA. Microsoft explains that tone detection will “offer writing refinements to suggest changes to tone. These suggestions will allow the user to communicate more clearly and in a desired tone to deter misinterpretation.” In other words, Editor monitors what you type as you compose messages, and if it considers that your tone is getting a tad snarky or offensive, Editor steps in with suggestions to make your text less provocative with an “improved conversational tone.” This is Microsoft 365 roadmap item 86539.

Microsoft said that the roll-out of tone detection should finish at the end of September 2021, so the feature should be available to all tenants now. However, “English – United States” appears to be the only language which supports tone detection in the set of Editor options exposed by OWA. This is usual as it takes time to refine the basic models to detect certain kinds of text in different languages.

Behind the Scenes

Microsoft Editor (a writing assistant that provides spelling, grammar, and other intelligent writing suggestions) already analyzes text as users type messages in OWA and the Microsoft 365 apps for enterprise to deal with spelling and grammatical errors. In 2020, Microsoft introduced text predictions, first in OWA and later in the desktop apps. Predicting what text comes next is a complicated business and depends on plenty of server horsepower to generate and refine the trainable algorithms from user input. Recurrent neural networks analyze the patterns in user writing to recognize how people put sentences and phrases together. This knowledge creates learning models to deliver the suggestions made as Editor observes what’s input into messages. Over time, the models improve as they process more messages. After a while, Editor will know the probability that someone will follow one phrase with another in email and how they stitch words together in sentences.

Outlook stores model data in a hidden folder in user mailboxes. The data is inaccessible to clients and isn’t shared with Microsoft. The model data is anonymized and does not hold personal details and “no message content is transmitted or stored outside of your organization,” which is how it should be.

Enabling Tone Detection

Not everyone is impressed with the thought of intelligent software analyzing and improving their writing. Fixing spellings and making sure that crass grammatical errors don’t creep into text is fine but telling someone that an automated assistant can improve the tone of their writing is a different matter.

Before Editor applies tone detection, you must enable it in the Editor settings. In a message compose screen, you can expose the Editor settings by clicking the Editor icon (if not, click the […] menu and choose Editor). Tone detection is the last option. So far, “Politeness” is the only setting under tone detection (Figure 1). The fact that tone detection gets its own category makes me think that Microsoft has some additional settings in the works.

After consenting to allow Editor to monitor message text for politeness, we can try things out by creating a new message complete with some potentially rude statements (Editor might not share your definition of what is rude). To be sure to get Editor’s attention, I composed some blunt and forthright commentary on the usefulness of a recipient (Figure 2).

Editor duly stepped in to advise I might be impolite and suggested some alternate text, and that’s when the weakness of the algorithm revealed itself. The suggested alternative did not capture the meaning or intent of the original text. I said something impolite under my breath and tried again. This time Editor was more successful, and the suggested text matched the impolite version more closely (Figure 3).

Time Needed for Model to Improve

My email writing style tends to be blunt. I don’t like wasting words (too many articles to write). As such, I thought that Editor would pick up more instances of impoliteness than it has done over a week’s use. As noted above, some of the recommendations are off base. I think the number of flawed suggestions will decrease over time. At least, that’s the promise of artificial intelligence and learning models, isn’t it?

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A Banner Notification Difficult to Ignore?

I’m unsure what to make of the news in MC264090 (updated July 1) telling us that Outlook (and OWA) users on Windows 10 will soon see a clickable recommendation to install the Outlook in Edge extension (currently in preview). The recommendation will appear in “any Windows browser” (if using OWA) or in Outlook desktop (presumably Outlook click to run rather than Outlook perpetual). The recommendation is dismissible but annoying and can appear a maximum of three times “in each app” before it is “suppressed permanently.” Those who use both OWA and Outlook can therefore see the banner six times, which is something to look forward to.

If you succumb and install the extension, an Outlook icon appears in the Edge menu bar (Figure 1). It has access to the site because the user grants consent to access their mailbox.

Bringing the Power of Outlook to an Edge Icon

According to Microsoft 365 roadmap item 82036, “The Microsoft Outlook browser extension brings you the power of mail, calendar, contacts, and tasks using an icon in Microsoft Edge. Quickly access your Outlook work account or your Outlook.com or Hotmail account without switching to another tab or app. The extension will be available in the Chrome Store soon as well.”

Apart from anything else, the roadmap item tells us that the Outlook extension will also be available for Chrome users, presumably again on Windows 10 (and likely Windows 11, since that appears to be Windows 10 with a new skin).

The reason why I am conflicted is that I don’t see the point in the extension. If I want to use OWA (and I do), I open a tab in the browser for OWA and keep that tab open. I can then do whatever I want with email, tasks, contacts, and the calendar. It’s like using the “peeks” available in Outlook desktop to get an insight into data. Being able to overlay the calendar when processing email (Figure 2) is mildly interesting and enough to convince me to keep the extension, but it’s not something I use heavily.

Apart from the calendar, the extension can peek into your mailbox, tasks (including any To Do list), and contacts. Within the mailbox, you can select any folder, but you cannot select another mailbox, including your archive mailbox. The extension allows you to select different calendars to view. However, this part doesn’t work so well in the preview and was inclined to freeze. You can also access a limited selection of OWA settings. For instance, you can set an auto-reply message. And if you want access to the full functionality of a section of OWA, the extension can open into a tab. Just about the only thing which is missing is Project Moca.

Blocking the Clickable Recommendations

Although the Outlook extension doesn’t float my boat, I can see how it will work for others. The real question for tenant administrators is if they want to block the display of the recommendation banner by using the Office Cloud Policy Service (OCPS) to set “Recommend the Microsoft Outlook Extension” policy to ‘Disabled’ (Figure 3). OCPS settings affect both OWA and Outlook for Windows.

According to MC264090, a future update to Group Policy templates will support the block too in Outlook by setting the RecommendOutlookExtension system registry (DWORD) value at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Office\16.0\outlook\options to 0 (disabled).

Good for Some

Targeted release is due in July and tenants need to act before July 30, 2021, if they don’t want users to see the clickable banners. Before deciding, try the extension yourself to see if you think people will find value in its use. If not, go ahead and block. If you do, let people see the banners and install the extension if they wish.

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A New Way to View What Needs to be Done

Microsoft 365 message center notification MC248428 published on April 3 announces a new calendar view for OWA. The board view, which is now rolling out to tenants, is “an expanded view where users can manage workloads like calendar, tasks, goals, flagged emails, and files.” According to roadmap item 70746, “people can organize and manage their time, beyond the hour to hour time slots in a redesigned free-flow view of the things that are important.”

The Moca Variation

This all sounds wonderful until you realize that the new view is a variation on Project Moca (aka Outlook spaces), a “new productivity module” launched in preview in October 2020. I have both Project Moca and the new board view available in OWA and it’s hard to tell the two apart. Both feature a rearrangeable board where users can position and resize items of interest, including notes, to-do items, people cards, goals (all-day calendar events), documents, collections (Moca used to call these buckets but now uses the same term), and weather items. The idea is that you can assemble different pieces of information and keep them together in an accessible space. It’s a reasonable idea.

The big difference between a Moca board and the calendar board is that OWA includes the user’s calendar (Figure 1).

Putting Email on the Calendar Board

Another big difference is the lack of a search feature to find information in your mailbox to pin to the board. This is a pity because a lot of information is in email, a fact acknowledged by OWA’s Add to Project Moca option (Figure 2).

I experimented with different ways to add an email to the calendar board including cut and paste of message text into a note and drag and drop. These didn’t work. What did is to create a link item and insert the deeplink shown in the browser bar when a message is selected in OWA. The URI is like:

https://outlook.office.com/mail/inbox/id/AAQkADMxZTJlY2U0LTU0MjYtNDhlMC04Y2UyLWE5NmRmN2MzMTZiMwAQABlNJsx1SbRGu79e8dP2k2I%3D

The same approach works for inserting a deeplink pointing to a Teams message.

The OWA Calendar Board View is a Customized Moca Board

OWA’s new calendar board view is a Moca board customized to highlight the calendar and associated items. Like other Moca boards, the assets (items) for the OWA calendar board are in a folder in the non-IPM part of the user’s mailbox (in my case, the folder is OutlookSpaceAssetsf4ff9062-1465-41f4-80dc-35f63b43b1fa).

Project Moca continues as a separate part of OWA because it allows users to create multiple boards, each dedicated for a different purpose. Whether Moca ever leaves preview to become generally available is a decision Microsoft must make. I haven’t heard of many people using Moca, but this might be simply due to lack of awareness. Perhaps when people use the board view to organize their calendar, they’ll want to create their own boards and can do so through Moca. Time will tell.

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Questions About Clients, Addresses, and Support

Following last week’s very underplayed disclosure that Exchange Online supports sending email using any proxy address for a mailbox, some questions popped up in the various ways people communicate with me. Here are the most common questions with the best answers I can come up with.

Outlook Support for Send with a Proxy Address

OWA is explicitly mentioned in the Microsoft 365 roadmap item describing using proxy addresses to send email. Many asked when Outlook desktop will support the feature. The answer is “right now,” if you use a recent version (I tested the feature with Outlook version 2014 build 13929.20216).

Microsoft has done the heavy lifting to make Exchange Online understand how to deal with proxy addresses; some work is still to be done to upgrade OWA (first) and Outlook to allow users to select proxy addresses more easily, but the fact is that you can use any version of Outlook today. The trick is to expose the From field for a new message and populate the field with your preferred proxy address (Figure 1).

Sending Using a Proxy from Outlook Mobile

The Outlook mobile clients don’t currently support sending from a proxy address. Now that Exchange Online supports the feature, the hope is that Microsoft will allow Outlook mobile clients to expose the From field and support sending messages using a proxy address.

Send Using Proxy Address in Exchange On-premises?

Another common question is if support for sending email using proxy addresses will ever appear in Exchange Server? I don’t know the answer. On the surface, it seems like Microsoft has done the work to upgrade the Exchange transport service to deal with sending messages using proxy addresses and that it should be easy to transfer the code to Exchange Server. But software engineering is seldom as straightforward as people assume, and I don’t know if any dependencies exist which could stop Microsoft moving the code over. Exchange Server and Exchange Online used to share a common code bas, but not now. The code bases are different and who knows what work must be done to upgrade Exchange Server, including the GUI change to OWA.

In addition, what version of Exchange Server is the target? Exchange 2019, an earlier version, or the next version of Exchange Server due in the second half of 2021? A bet might win if placed on Exchange 2022 or whatever the new version is called, but I have doubts that Microsoft will bring the code to Exchange 2019 or earlier.

Using Proxy Addresses in Replies

Others asked if the proxy address is used for replies. The answer is yes. When you choose a proxy address for a new message, Exchange puts the address in the From and Return-Path message properties, meaning that any response to the message picks up and uses the proxy address. The inbound message with the proxy address is treated by Exchange like any other email and checked against the directory. Because the proxy address belongs to a mailbox, Exchange accepts the message and routes it to the mailbox. This is easily verified by sending a message using a proxy address and examining any response which comes back (the Outlook Message Header Analyzer add-in makes this easy to do). Figure 2 shows that the reply to the message I created in Figure 1 comes back to the specified address.

Although a response to a message sent using a proxy address will go back to that proxy address, the use of the proxy address is not maintained in subsequent replies in a thread. This is likely a client restriction that Microsoft will address when they upgrade clients to support send from proxy addresses fully. In the meantime, the workaround is to use the From field to choose the appropriate address when you respond to a message.

Can All Proxy Addresses Be Used?

I was asked if all proxy addresses available for a mailbox can be used to send email. The answer is that this is an SMTP feature so only SMTP proxy addresses are usable, including plus addresses (another question). In fact, you might note that I use a plus address in Figure 1.

As a recap, Microsoft added support for plus addressing to Exchange Online in August 2020. Newer tenants (created since September 2020) enable users to create their own plus addresses while older tenants need to enable the feature by running the Set-OrganizationConfig cmdlet:

Set-OrganizationConfig -AllowPlusAddressInRecipients $True

When AllowPlusAddressInRecipients is True, users can add whatever text string they want after a plus sign when they give an email address to companies or other people. In the example in Figure 1, I use Tony.Redmond+eCommerce@office365itpros.com. When the message arrives, Exchange trims the plus sign together with everything following and delivers the message to Tony.Redmond @office365itpros.com. Administrators can also assign a persistent plus address as a proxy address through EAC or PowerShell. For example:

Set-Mailbox -Identity Tony.Redmond -EmailAddresses @{add="Tony.Redmond+eCommerce@office365itpros.com"}

The advantage of having a persistent plus address which is part of the set of proxy addresses assigned to a mailbox is that it can then be used to send email.

Finding What Proxy Addresses Exist for User Mailboxes

Finally, someone asked how easy it is to discover what proxy addresses exist for mailboxes. You can examine the properties of individual mailboxes through the EAC or Microsoft 365 admin center, but that doesn’t work so well at scale. Instead, here’s some PowerShell to create a quick and dirty report for all user mailboxes and their proxy addresses.

$Report = [System.Collections.Generic.List[Object]]::new()
$Mbx = Get-ExoMailbox -ResultSize Unlimited -RecipientTypeDetails UserMailbox
ForEach ($M in $Mbx) {
    $DefaultEmailAddress = ($M.EmailAddresses | ? {$_ -cLike "SMTP:*"}).Split(":")[1]
    [array]$OtherEmailAddresses = $M.EmailAddresses | ? {$_ -cLike "smtp:*"}
    $Addresses = [System.Collections.Generic.List[Object]]::new()
    ForEach ($Address in $OtherEmailAddresses) {
        $ThisAddress = $Address.Split(":")[1] + " "
        $Address = [PSCustomObject][Ordered]@{  
            Address  = $ThisAddress.Trim() }
        $Addresses.Add($Address) 
    } # End Foreach $Address
    $Addresses = $Addresses.Address -join ", "
    If ($M.EmailAddresses -contains "SIP") {
        $SIPAddress = ($M.EmailAddresses | ? {$_ -cLike "SIP:*"}).Split(":")[1]}
    Else {$SIPAddress = "None"}
    $ReportLine = [PSCustomObject][Ordered]@{  
       User                   = $M.DisplayName 
       UPN                    = $M.UserPrincipalName 
      "Default Email Address" = $DefaultEmailAddress
      "Other Email Addresses" = $Addresses
      "SIP Address"           = $SIPAddress }
    $Report.Add($ReportLine) 
} #End ForEach $M
$Report | Out-GridView

The script reports its results via the Out-GridView cmdlet. You could easily amend it to export the results to a CSV file.

A Welcome Feature

Most of the people I have spoken to agree that allowing the use of proxy addresses to send email is a good thing. Many say that it’s odd that Microsoft hasn’t added the feature before but are glad that it is here now. I guess Exchange is sometimes like a large ocean liner – it takes time to make adjustments.

As I hear of other questions, I will update this post.

Need more information about how Exchange Online works inside Microsoft 365? The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook has the answers and because it’s updated monthly, we make sure that our subscribers know about important new features soon after Microsoft delivers the code.

Edge WebView2 Enables Reusable OWA Features

Last October, I wrote about Microsoft’s One Outlook vision, essentially a plan to rationalize the many forms of Outlook around a more rational approach to development. The Edge WebView2 control is a big part of the plan because it enables Outlook desktop to consume web-based features developed for OWA. That’s why Microsoft now distributes the WebView2 control with Microsoft 365 apps for enterprise (desktop Office click to run).

Room Finder Now Used in Outlook Desktop

In the article, I mentioned OWA’s revamped room finder (to locate a conference room for an in-person meeting – something we all hope will resume soon) as an example of the functionality which would turn up in Outlook desktop. With version 2103 (the current channel preview), Outlook desktop now uses OWA’s room finder. Figure 1 shows the room finder in OWA while Figure 2 shows it in Outlook desktop.

As you can see, it’s the same component, and sometimes when Outlook first loads the component, you see the OWA sign-in screen.

Looks Like a Win-Win Approach

The advantages of this approach to Microsoft are obvious: they can write a component once, deploy it in OWA to shake down any bugs, and then reuse the component in Outlook desktop. Apart from saving engineering effort to create code for multiple clients, it reduces the cost of ongoing sustaining engineering.

It’s good for customers too. Apart from experiencing the same feature behavior across the Outlook family, new features should appear faster. The Outlook desktop user interface as always been much slower to evolve than its web counterpart, largely because of the legacy of almost twenty-five years of development. With the new model, Outlook desktop can refresh its capabilities more rapidly. Of course, the proof will be seen as Outlook evolves, but at least the process is now moving.

Use Share to Teams to post a Conversation from Outlook to Teams

Message center notification MC238648 published on February 9 said that Microsoft would update the Share to Teams feature. The update dutifully appeared on schedule during the last week of March. This feature is covered by Microsoft 365 roadmap items 71265, 70598, and 68909 because it is available in Outlook for Windows (Microsoft 365 apps for enterprise – March monthly channel), OWA, and Outlook for Mac (preview). The feature is not yet available for Outlook mobile.

The idea behind Share to Teams is simple. People receive a lot of email that they would like to discuss with colleagues. They could conduct the discussion in email with the known downsides of interminable series of to-and-fro replies, not all of which might be circulated to the same people. Taking the discussion to Teams keeps focus and makes sure that everyone sees the discussion developing and can contribute as needed.

Share to Teams Target Destinations

Launched in 2020, Share to Teams uses the same email connector infrastructure used to support the ability to send email to a channel. This is a connector which uses cloud-only mailboxes to accept inbound email addressed to channels and deliver them to Teams. In the case of Share to Teams, the addressee can be:

• A person (the message is delivered to a personal chat). The sender must be able to send a message to the person (information barrier policies can block people communicating via chat).
• A group chat: If you share a message from Outlook to multiple users, Teams delivers the message to the group chat involving those users (if one exists) or otherwise creates a new group chat.
• Any channel that the sender can access, including private channels. You cannot share to multiple channels at one time.

In all cases, messages can be sent with attachments.

Figure 1 shows a typical example. In this instance, we’re sharing a message from Outlook to a Teams channel.

Figure 2 shows what the shared message looks like in Teams. As you can see, it looks like any other base note for a conversation. Replies can be posted as normal. The only jarring note is that Teams does not highlight the subject of the conversation to make the topic stand out better in a list of topics.

You must be signed into your home tenant to be able to post messages to Teams. If you’re signed in as a guest to another tenant, Teams will tell you that you need to switch before it can post.

Capturing Message Copies in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business

Apart from messages delivered to target destinations, like email sent to channels, a copy of the shared message (including attachments) is captured in the Email Messages folder in the channel folder in the document library of the SharePoint Online team site. This is the way that the email connector used to behave until February 2021. Now, messages sent to a channel go into a folder named for the month, like EmailMessages_4_2021 for messages sent in April 2021. The change in target folder annoyed many people because it broke some Flows, and inconsistency like this drives people up the wall across Teams is maddening.

Copies of messages shared with individuals or group chats are in the Microsoft Teams Chat Files folder of the sender’s OneDrive for Business account.

No Protected Email

You can’t select the Share to Teams option for messages protected with sensitivity labels, the standard Outlook Encrypt-Only or Do Not Forward options, or S/MIME. This is because the connector cannot remove the encryption which protects these messages.

What’s Changed

When you share an Outlook message to Teams, the add-in checks for the presence of the Teams desktop client. If it’s available, the add-in uses single sign-on (SSO) to launch a new window in the Teams client to compose the message details for sharing. This is the major difference between the old method and the new. Creating a window in an already connected Teams client is faster and creates less overhead than the alternative, which is for Outlook to do the work to connect to Teams and send the message.

Admin Control

Microsoft says that Share to Teams is controllable “by selectively enabling or disabling this add-in for individual users via PowerShell Cmdlet. Admin documentation will be published soon.” Although Microsoft is promising that a cmdlet will be available, I’m not sure if many tenants will want to disable Share to Teams. It’s not a function that I used often, but I am grateful that it’s there when I need it. I suspect most other organizations will be in the same category.

This refresh won’t make much difference to users. It’s a improvement in software engineering that will bypass most, but that’s not a reason to ignore the development and update a paragraph in the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. It’s what we do.

Relax. It’s an Outlook Component

Microsoft published message center notification MC242585 (Microsoft 365 roadmap item 70699) on March 3 to bring the news that devices running the Microsoft 365 apps for enterprise (aka Office click to run) will get the Edge WebView2 runtime along with version 2101 (or later). I’m running version 2102 (Current channel -preview) and never noticed the arrival of WebView2. Those in the current channel not using the preview should see the change in April, unless your Office 365 tenant is hosted in a sovereign cloud or GCC (including High and DoD) where this action won’t happen.

Only Windows PCs are affected and only those which have Microsoft 365 apps for enterprise. Other devices can get the runtime by installing the Edge browser. Edge is a nice browser, even if its sleeping tabs sometimes cause disruption for SharePoint, and I have nearly broken my Chrome habit to use Edge exclusively.

Getting back to the point, installing the WebView2 runtime is like installing the Visual C++ 2008 redistributable, a much beloved inclusion in Windows updates. It’s a non-event.

No Cunning Plan

People became upset when they read the announcement and wondered if this was another cunning plan from Microsoft to force everyone to use Edge. It’s not. Edge isn’t installed and your choice of default browser remains intact. Instead, it’s using the Office distribution channel as a convenient way to make sure that the WebView2 component is available on PCs.

WebView2 is a critical part of OWA Powered Experiences (OPX). In a nutshell, Microsoft wants to be able to write software once and use it in multiple Outlook clients. New features like the Room Finder and Meeting Insights built for OWA use WebView2 as a rending engine, and the presence of the WebView2 runtime allows Outlook desktop to use the features without any changes (Figure 1). If WebView2 isn’t available, the features can’t work. Microsoft benefits by writing a feature once for multiple clients. Users benefit because clients behave the same way and features arrive faster.

Administrative Control for Edge WebView2

There’s no reason that I can think of not to allow Edge WebView2 runtime to be installed, but you can block it through the Customization section of the Apps Admin Center. Go to Device Configuration, then Modern Apps settings, and disable the automatic installation (Figure 2).

For more information, read Microsoft’s instructions.

Sharing is Caring, Unless You Can’t

Software has a nasty habit of making people feel incompetent when they don’t understand why functionality doesn’t work as expected. Maybe it’s age, but I become increasingly frustrated when software doesn’t work as I want it to. Which brings me to the OSE204 error signaled by SharePoint Online when I tried to share a document (Figure 1).

The first question is why SharePoint insists on acting as if it’s mainframe software of the mid-1980s by issuing cryptic error codes. Fortunately, SharePoint includes some intelligible text to explain why it complained about an action, which makes it even stranger why OSE204 appears. It must be a SharePoint thing, just like Exchange people can explain the finer points of why DMARC is important.

Microsoft publishes a page to explain SharePoint and OneDrive sharing errors and helpfully asserts that the reader must be a SharePoint administrator to resolve the underlying problems. Reading through the text, we discover that users can encounter eleven different sharing errors from OSE202 to OSE404, which seems like a lot. Then again, sharing is a complicated business when you consider the permutations of sharing with people inside your tenant, guest users, external users, and so on.

Why OSE204 Happened

The page says: ”Error OSE204 indicates that sharing is turned off for the site that you’re trying to share from” and explains that an administrator can fix the problem by updating the sharing capability of the site. Unfortunately, it doesn’t cover what I did to provoke the problem, which was to change the sensitivity label assigned to the site. Sensitivity labels used for container management can control the sharing capability for a site. When I updated the assigned label, SharePoint applied the label settings and blocked sharing to external users. What happened is very logical and an excellent example of how powerful policy-based management through sensitivity labels is. But figuring out what had happened didn’t make me feel any less incompetent.

A SharePoint administrator isn’t needed to fix the problem. Because the sensitivity label assigned to the site controls the sharing capability, a site owner can restore sharing with external users by selecting a sensitivity label which permits this action.

Removing the Outlook Sharing Option

Message center notification MC237377 (updated February 19) says that the Outlook sharing option (send the sharing link via email) shown in Figure 1 is being withdrawn in March 2021. The logic is that the option adds no value. It works by creating a sharing link that’s inserted into an OWA compose window with a message addressed to the recipient entered in the Send link dialog. Microsoft says that much the same happens if you go through the normal process of creating and sharing a link. However, some differences do exist:

• The sender can change the message title. Instead of receiving a message with a subject like “Tony Redmond has shared SharePoint Sharing Errors with you,” the sender can change the subject to make it more impactful.
• The sender can enter more text to set context for the sharing link. SharePoint limits the text that a sharer can insert to 500 characters. When a link is inserted into an OWA message, the sharer can use the full editor available in OWA to insert whatever text, graphics, objects, and formatting they choose. Or even make sure that their carefully-crafted corporate autosignature is in the message (Figure 2).
• The sender can set message properties. OWA offers many possibilities for a sender to set properties of a message. For instance, they could use the Encrypt-only feature or add a sensitivity label to protect its contents.

The workaround is to copy the sharing link to the clipboard and paste the link into a message. The advantage of this is that no dependency exists on OWA. You can use the email client of your choice to format the message to sharing recipients in whatever way you choose.

Debatable Choice to Remove the Outlook Option

It’s understandable that Microsoft would want to rationalize functionality. In this case it’s debatable if removing a convenient option is justifiable. Perhaps Microsoft’s telemetry informs them that people make little use of the Outlook option. If that’s so, the removal is appropriate, but Microsoft isn’t saying.

I think it’s a pity that Microsoft plans to remove the Outlook option for sending sharing links. Although I normally use the default method to share links with people, the option to compose a message of more than 500 characters with a full editor is useful when sharing specific documents. I guess the folks who made the decision never feel the same need.

Update March 11: In a triumph for good sense, Microsoft said “Based on learning’s from our early rings and your feedback we have made the decision to not proceed as outlined below. The Send link to Outlook sharing option will remain until further notice. Thank you for your feedback.”

The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook includes extensive coverage of using sensitivity labels for container management. We don’t cover error OSE204 or the other ten errors you can see when sharing SharePoint or OneDrive content. Something must be left out to keep the book to a reasonable size.

OWA Gets Remove External Access Feature

Office 365 notification MC216367 (updated August 27) announced that end users would be able to revoke messages protected by Office 365 Message Encryption (OME) if they are eligible for the advanced form of OME, licensed through Office 365 E5 or other licenses (like Microsoft 365 E5 compliance). OME allows users to encrypt or mark messages with Do Not Forward using OWA and Outlook desktop. Microsoft automatically enables OME for all Office 365 tenants with E3 or above licenses.

The new feature means that after you send a revocable message, you can use the Remove external access option to revoke access to the message (Figure 1). This feature is only available in OWA and only works for some external recipients (see below), but it’s still a nice option to have if you suddenly need to withdraw access to sensitive content that’s been distributed outside your tenant.

In addition to being able to revoke messages sent with the standard OME Encrypt-Only or Do Not Forward protection, the Remove external access feature also works for messages with an Office 365 sensitivity label, which can use rights management based encryption to secure access to content. Figure 2 shows a message protected by the Financial Data sensitivity label. Revoking access for external recipients works in the same way.

After the message is revoked, the OWA message header is changed to confirm that external access has been removed. At this point, any attempt by the recipient to open the content will be declined because “this message has been revoked by the sender.”

What Messages Can be Revoked

Revocation only works for external recipients. You can’t revoke a message delivered to recipients in your tenant. OME divides external recipients into two categories:

• Accounts in Office 365 domains and Outlook.com: You can’t revoke messages delivered to these recipients.
• Accounts in any other domain: Messages sent to these recipients can be revoked because the actual message is not delivered to their mailboxes. Instead, they receive a notification directing them to the OME portal. These notifications are called link-based messages. Recipients must authenticate with the OME portal by signing in or using a one-time passcode to access the protected content.

Revocation is possible for link-based messages because you can guarantee to block access at the OME portal. Revocation of messages delivered to other Office 365 domains or Outlook.com would require the ability to interfere with mail flow in those domains, and that’s not possible today.

Administrator Revocation

Prior to this development, protected messages could only be revoked by administrators using PowerShell or the Message encryption report in the compliance center. As the message encryption report is usually a few days behind real time and the need to retrieve sensitive information often makes revocation something that happens “now,” the best approach is to run a message trace in the new Exchange admin center (EAC) or the old Security and compliance center to find the message identifier and then revoke it with PowerShell.

Figure 3 shows the results of a message trace in the new EAC. After finding the message we want to revoke, we can check its properties to find the message identifier.

After saving the message identifier, we can use it with the Get-OMEMessageStatus cmdlet to check if it can be revoked (see below).

$msgId = "DB7PR04MB44108EE5BE4CD44B7452E20A8B050@DB7PR04MB4410.eurprd04.prod.outlook.com"
Get-OMEMessageStatus -MessageId $MsgId

ObjectState  : New
Container    : SystemMailbox{D0E409A0-AF9B-4720-92FE-AAC869B0D201}@office365itpros.onmicrosoft.com

Subject      : Project Quarterdeck
ReceivedTime : 01/01/0001 00:00:00
Revoked      : False
IsRevocable  : True

In this case, the IsRevocable flag is True, so we can go ahead and revoke using the Set-OMEMessageRevocation cmdlet:

Set-OMEMessageRevocation -Revoke $True -MessageId $MsgId
The encrypted email with subject "Project Quarterdeck" and Message ID "DB7PR04MB44108EE5BE4CD44B7452E20A8B050@DB7PR04MB4410.eurprd04.prod.outlook.com" was successfully revoked.

Running Get-OMEMessageStatus for the message will now show that the Revoked property has changed from False to True and the recipient will no longer have access to the content.

One irritation is that Get-OMEMessageStatus shows that these messages can be revoked and you can try to revoke them with Set-OMEMessageRevocation (which tells you that the revocation is successful), but recipients will still have access to the messages. I guess the cmdlet can’t tell the difference between messages sent by link and those which go direct

Detail like this leads to a couple of lines in the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. Even a book spanning 615,000 words can’t cover everything in depth, which is why we have this web site. But that’s no reason to not subscribe to the book.

Wow! Where Did All Those Unread Items Come From?

Last Tuesday, I checked for updates for the Microsoft 365 apps for enterprise (Office click to run) and duly downloaded the available update to upgrade to version 2009 (build 13231.20200). Nothing strange happened and the upgrade proceeded without any issues. I was a happy camper.

That is, until I noticed that the unread count for my Outlook Groups suddenly displayed much higher numbers (Figure 1). Usually these groups have a very low number of unread items, especially those marked as favorites because I check them at least once daily.

The History of Groups

The reason why this happens is clouded in history. When Microsoft introduced Office 365 Groups (now Microsoft 365 Groups) in November 2014, they were characterized as a new way for email-centric collaboration. Teams didn’t exist at that point and although Microsoft’s marketing muscle was pushing Yammer (bought in June 2012) as the future for collaboration and a replacement for email (that strategy really worked out), the bulk of interpersonal electronic collaboration occurred over email.

In the on-premises world, many Exchange organizations combined distribution lists with public folders to give people an archive for discussions. Groups introduced a group mailbox to host discussions and a shared calendar and came with a SharePoint Online team site for document storage, including a shared group OneNote notebook. Given that the bulk of work that had been migrated to Office 365 at that point was email, Groups looked pretty good. In April 2017, Groups (now called Groups in Outlook) had 10 million active users, or roughly 10% of the Office 365 user count at the time. The latest figure for Office 365 is 258 paid seats (April 2020). It’s unlikely that Outlook Groups have kept pace and now has 25 million active users, but it’s possible.

The collaboration landscape within Office 365 changed upon the general availability of Teams in March 2017. Since then, Teams has taken the lead and Groups have concentrated on a new mission of delivering a membership and access service to applications like Teams. Usage of Outlook Groups as a fulcrum for email-based collaboration is much less important to Microsoft now, but Groups are still actively used in this way in many Office 365 tenants.

Choosing a Simpler Unread Count Model for Groups

When Groups were added to Outlook in 2015, the developers decided not to use the standard item read/unread model as used in other mailbox folders like the Inbox. This model depends on the unread status of items and operates on a per-user basis. In other words, in a shared resource like a group inbox or public folder, each user has a separate unread count generated by the number of items they have not read in the folder.

Instead, the group developers chose a “more simple triage model for the groups conversations list, where all the conversations would be marked as seen as you moved away from the group.” Apparently, the decision was based on user feedback that many groups contain conversations unimportant to some members, so you couldn’t expect them to read everything. As implemented in Outlook, the group seen/unseen model allowed users to scan a group for new items and then set the unread count to zero once the user moves from the group. The new item count for a group then becomes the number of items delivered to the group since the last access by the user.

By comparison, new messages delivered to an inbox are personal and the mailbox owner is expected to deal with them. The new item count for the inbox is therefore very important for the mailbox owner and is adjusted up and down as the unread status for messages change (you can mark a read item as unread).

OWA and Outlook Mobile Use Normal Unread Counts

At the time, the developers accepted that the difference in how folders reported unread counts caused user confusion and said that they were working on implementing an item read/unread model for Groups. That model was implemented by OWA in early 2019 and is in use today (Figure 2).

For whatever reason (prioritization, lack of resources, more pressing features, etc.), Outlook desktop is a long way behind OWA in moving to the item read/unread model. The latest builds of Outlook have switched to the item read/unread model, which is the reason why the unread counts for my groups suddenly exploded from their normal low levels. Outlook Mobile has also used item unread counts since early 2019.

Resetting the Unread Count for an Outlook Group

Another piece of good news is that the Outlook developers have included a Mark All as Read option to reset the unread count for a group. Select the group you want to reset, right-click, and select the option. Processing to reset the unread status for items occurs in a background thread, so it doesn’t stop you working while the unread count is reset. Depending on the number of unread items in the group, the option can take a little while to complete.

Unhappily, Outlook’s Mark All as Read option might not be able to update the status for all unread items. At least, it didn’t for me. My solution was to open the group with OWA and use its version of Mark All as Read, which worked flawlessly.

The good news is that as you open unread items in in a group using one client, the read status for the item and unread count for the group is updated and shown correctly across all Outlook clients.

Hindsight Always Best

The benefit of hindsight tells us that the decision of the Groups developers to go with the simpler read/unread model for their Outlook implementation was flawed. The change made in the other clients in 2019 is now showing up in Outlook desktop. A little preparation and user communication should be enough to get everyone over the shock of seeing elevated unread counts for their groups.

This one-time change will probably warrant a line or two in the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. It’s an example of a small change that’s important for some users for a period. Once the change is done, it’s done. But change persists inside Office 365, which is why we keep updating the book.

Works for Teams or Skype for Business Online Meetings

Office 365 Notification MC213856 published on May 20 tells us that users will soon be able to configure an organizational setting to instruct OWA, Outlook for Mac, and Outlook mobile clients to make any new meeting created into an online event. Given the current need to work from home, this change reflects the transition of many meetings from in-person events to online.

The feature only works when an account is connected to an Office 365 tenant with Teams or Skype for Business Online configured for online meetings. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t work with other online meeting providers like Zoom and GoToMeeting. Outlook Mobile can be configured to support third-party online meeting providers.

Three roadmap items are covered by the announcement: 63383 (OWA), 63625 (Outlook for iOS), and 63628 (Outlook for Android). MC230567 published on December 16 says that Outlook for Windows will introduce the feature in early 2021.

Making Online Meetings

Today, users must take an explicit action to create an online meeting. For example, in OWA, they set a slider to mark the meeting as a Teams or Skype for Business event. When this happens, the client retrieves a URI from the online provider pointing to the online “space” used for the meeting and inserts the URI into the meeting request. Other properties of the meeting request are updated to allow participants to join the meeting online.

Microsoft will release a client update for OWA at the end of May with Outlook mobile clients being updated over the June-July period. When available, the updates allow users to control whether they want to make every meeting an online event. In the meantime, some PowerShell settings are already available to control the feature at a tenant and mailbox level.

Tenant Online Meeting Setting

The Set-OrganizationConfig cmdlet manages the Exchange Online tenant configuration. The OnlineMeetingsByDefaultEnabled setting is False, meaning that online meetings are not the default. Updating the setting to True makes online meetings the default, and clients that support the setting will use it unless it is overridden by a mailbox-specific setting.

Set-OrganizationConfig –OnlineMeetingsByDefaultEnabled $True

Mailbox Online Meeting Setting

To override the organization setting on a mailbox level, run the Set-MailboxCalendarConfiguration cmdlet. The mailbox setting has the same name, but it’s Null by default, meaning that the organization setting takes precedence. You can set the value to $True to force the use of online meetings or $False to make “normal” (non-online) meetings be the default. Here’s a typical example of updating the calendar configuration for a mailbox.

Set-MailboxCalendarConfiguration -OnlineMeetingsByDefaultEnabled $True -Identity Kim.Akers

Actions

If you do nothing, the organization setting will be False, and clients will work as they do today unless and until users update their calendar settings. The need to update the organization setting depends on the type of company, its meeting culture, and the prevalence of online meetings (using Teams and Skype for Business).

If you use another online meeting provider, leave the organization setting alone and don’t tell users about the calendar settings. On the other hand, if you’re deep into Teams or Skype for Business, maybe the right idea is to switch to online meetings by default. It all depends on how people work in your company.

Stay updated with developments inside Office 365 by subscribing to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook.

Including a Nice Bricks Theme

We all need a little levity in our lives right now…

In June 2019, I reported the introduction of three new themes (Ribbon, Rainbow, and Unicorn) to brighten the lives of Office 365 users. Microsoft has gradually built out the set of available themes to 49 at today’s count. I must admit that this fact utterly escaped my attention until I noticed a Microsoft presenter using a nice Lego(tm) -like theme called “Bricks” (Figure 1). And because the world has been a crazy place recently, I decided that this topic needed some attention.

Choosing Your Theme

Some of the themes are simple colors like Black, Watermelon, and Dark Orange. Others appeal to the more artistic side of users and include:

• Balloons.
• Beach sunset.
• Cats.
• Circuit.
• Comic book.
• Crayon.
• Cubanism.
• Far, far, away.
• Jelly fish.
• Mountain peak.
• Primary.
• Robot.
• Strawberry.
• Super Sparkle Happy.

I’m not sure that I could cope with looking at the Super Sparkle Happy theme on a daily basis, but no doubt some will like it. Figure 2 shows how to select a theme from Office 365 settings. In this instance, it’s Super Sparkle Happy!

Theme Used Across Office 365 Online Apps

You can occupy a couple of minutes browsing the available themes and deciding which one satisfies your aesthetic viewpoint. Once selected, the theme should be picked up by all the Office online apps like OWA, SharePoint, OneDrive, Stream, Yammer, Planner, and the Microsoft 365 admin center. The Teams browser client will ignore your choice on the basis that such an important app can’t be concerned with such trivial detail, but the Teams admin center is happy to comply.

Spreading happiness is part of what we do at the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. A little laughter goes a long way when the world seems to be crazier by the day.

Outlook.com, Google, and TeamSnap Calendars

Office 365 Notification MC201582 published on January 17 announced that users could add personal calendars and TeamSnap accounts to OWA. This capability first surfaced in November 2019 when Microsoft tested it with selected accounts. This early testing was to validate the functionality prior to commencing deployment in production.

Deployment began to targeted release Office 365 tenants in January, was halted briefly to make some adjustments, and has now reached my tenant. Microsoft anticipates that deployment to standard release tenants will begin in April and worldwide availability will be achieved in July.

Update 4 May: Microsoft now says that the deployment will begin in mid-May and be finished in July 2020.

Just One Personal Calendar

A personal calendar means a calendar belonging to an Outlook.com or Google account. TeamSnap is a U.S.-based service to organize calendars for recreational clubs, such as soccer or hockey clubs.

To add a personal calendar, open OWA’s calendar module and select Add personal calendars (Figure 1) The use of the plural term here might lead you to believe that you can add multiple personal calendars. However, OWA currently limits users to choosing either an Outlook.com or Google calendar, and you can only add a single calendar of the chosen type.

Shared Calendar Views

You’ll need to authenticate to open and add the selected calendar. I was already signed into my Outlook.com account, so OWA added it automatically instead of asking which account to use.

After OWA opens the calendar, it includes events from the personal calendar in its view. In Figure 2, you can see events from my work and personal calendar shown in the same view. This is like the way that events appear when you choose to display several work calendars, such as those belonging to delegated, shared, or group mailboxes.

You can create new events in the personal calendar from OWA. One slight problem I noted is that OWA displays “Calendar” twice in the new event screen (Figure 3). The work calendar is the top calendar while the personal calendar is below, but it’s not obvious at first glance.

Microsoft says that the calendar selection issue will be alleviated when they ship a new calendar picker (soon, apparently).

You can’t add new TeamSnap events from OWA as access is limited to read-only. Also, calendars added by OWA are unavailable in Outlook desktop or Outlook mobile.

Availability

When you include a personal calendar in OWA, you can synchronize information from that calendar to Exchange Online to allow personal commitments to be included in their free/busy map. This means that when someone else tries to schedule a meeting with you using the Scheduling Assistant, your personal commitments are blocked out as busy.

If you don’t want to synchronize personal events to Exchange Online, toggle this option off in the Accounts section of Calendar options (Figure 4).

PowerShell Controls for Personal Calendars

Microsoft enables support for personal and TeamSnap calendars by default and there’s no obvious reason why you might want to disable these features, but you can with PowerShell. The features are controlled by the PersonalAccountCalendarsEnabled and TeamsnapCalendarsEnabled settings in the OWA mailbox policies assigned to mailboxes. To block access, update these settings to False. Here’s how to do it for all OWA mailbox policies in the organization:

Get-OWAMailboxPolicy | Set-OWAMailboxPolicy -PersonalAccountCalendarsEnabled $False -TeamsnapCalendarsEnabled $False

Like any change to OWA mailbox policies, the update won’t be effective until it is distributed across the tenants and clients refresh their settings. Updating the settings does nothing to remove access to personal or TeamSnap calendars from mailboxes where they are already configured.

Small but Good Change

Enabling access to personal calendars is an example of a feature that doesn’t seem important to tenant administrators while adding value to users. The demarcation between personal and work lives is increasingly blurred. Adding personal calendars to OWA reflects that fact and allows users to organize their time better, which is surely the reason to have calendars in the first place.

Finding it difficult to keep up to date with the details of changes within Office 365? Consider subscribing to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook and let us investigate the changes for you.

Engaging with Yammer While Reading Email

February 13 brought news (MC203778, Microsoft 365 roadmap 61055) that OWA could now display interactive Yammer notifications. Making Yammer more accessible through email is part of the “Year of Yammer” functionality highlighted at the Microsoft Ignite 2019 conference last November. It’s intended to make Yammer conversations more accessible and useful to people who prefer to communicate through email.

More Functionality Exposed in New Format Notification

Traditional Yammer notifications contain a View Conversation button with a link to take a reader to the relevant conversation in a Yammer community. The new format (Figure 1) displays a “fully-interactive Yammer thread” offering several improvements, including the ability to:

• See the complete Yammer conversation.
• Like a comment in the conversation.
• Share the conversation to another Yammer community.
• Know how many people have already seen the conversation.
• Add people to a conversation.
• Post a comment to the conversation from OWA, including attaching files and images or @mentioning people in a comment.

Microsoft also says that you can vote on polls from OWA, but I didn’t test that.

Comments posted from OWA show up in Yammer like any other comment, with the only sign being that Yammer indicates the post was from “O365 Exchange Online” (Figure 2).

Switching Views

At the bottom of the message, a Hide Yammer conversation link allows the reader to switch to the traditional view of a notification., which is what Outlook desktop and mobile clients can see.

In MC203778, Microsoft says that the link allows the new notification to be “toggled off at the user level on an email-by-email basis.” Going to the original format notification allows people to click the link to open Yammer, but there’s no way for a user to select a default preference for how they’d like to receive notifications.

Yammer and SharePoint

Also in Yammer news, Microsoft announced on 12 February that all new photos and files posted to Yammer are stored in SharePoint Online. This applies to Yammer communities connected to Office 365 Groups because that’s how the link works to SharePoint Online. When you upload a file to Yammer, it is stored in the Documents\Apps\Yammer folder in the document library of the site belonging to the Office 365 group.

More Interaction Coming

Microsoft is very keen about connecting different parts of Office 365 together at present. Teams is due to get its Share to Teams and Share to Outlook features soon. These were originally announced for deployment in January (MC198124) but have been delayed. When they come, you’ll be able to handle email, Teams, and Yammer communications in OWA.

If we’re truthful, we don’t devote much space to Yammer in the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. But if this progress is maintained, we might have to reconsider…

Improve the Readability of Teams Messages

From time to time, I check the settings in Teams policies to see if anything new has turned up or to pick up on something that I previously missed. Recently, I noticed the Immersive reader setting in the Teams Messaging policy (in PowerShell, it’s the AllowImmersiveReader property set with the Set-CsTeamsMessagingPolicy cmdlet). The description in the documentation says:

Allow immersive reader for viewing messages Turn this setting on to let users view messages in Microsoft Immersive Reader. Immersive Reader is a learning tool that provides a full screen reading experience to increase readability of text.

The Microsoft Immersive Reader is a free tool built into many Office programs to make it easier for people to read text. As you’d expect, the implementation differs across the apps. For instance, in Outlook desktop, the Read Aloud button reads the text of the message in the preview pane or when a message is opened. By comparison, the implementation in Teams and OWA is more “immersive” because the message opens in a full-screen window and the text is enlarged.

Using the Immersive Reader in Teams

You can read messages in personal or group chats or channel conversations with the Immersive Reader. Click the […] menu and select Immersive Reader (Figure 1).

Teams opens the message in full-screen mode. You can scroll through the text or have it read to you, with options to select a Male or Female voice and different speeds (Figure 2). I have not tried the reader in languages other than English, and the English reader doesn’t do so well if it meets non-English text. Perhaps people who use Teams in other languages can check and report back on their experience.

Using the Immersive Reader in OWA

OWA takes much the same kind of approach as used in Teams. Select a message, lick the […] menu, and choose Show in immersive reader (Figure 3). The same kind of controls and display seen in Teams are available when you open email with the immersive reader.

Most tenant administrators probably haven’t given much thought to message readability because there are many other things to worry about when managing Teams or Exchange Online. However, it’s nice to see technology like this available in the Office apps. A small but pleasant way to make Teams and email more accessible to all.

Although we don’t cover the Microsoft Immersive Reader in any depth in the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook, there’s lots more to discuss about Teams, Exchange Online, OWA, and other bits of Office 365. About 1,200 pages and counting…

Office Depends on Unified Labeling Client

Office 365 Message Center Notification MC193997 (24 October) brings the news that OWA will soon be able to automatically apply Office 365 sensitivity labels to outbound email (Office 365 roadmap item 56649). Automatic application is based on the detection of sensitive data types in content. This feature requires accounts to have Office 365 E5 licenses and is being deployed to Targeted Release tenants with roll-out due to complete by the end of 2019.

Outlook and the other Office desktop applications can apply sensitivity labels automatically if the Azure Information Protection client is installed on a PC. Microsoft is now upgrading Office applications to support the same functionality and OWA is the first application to receive the capability. Microsoft announced the preview for support for sensitivity labels in the Office Online apps and SharePoint Online at the Microsoft Ignite 2019 conference.

Auto-Labeling on Send

OWA applies automatic labeling when messages are sent and uses the content of the message body to decide if the test for the sensitive data is satisfied. The other Office applications perform automatic labeling when files are saved.

The sensitive data types used to detect content for auto-labeling are the same as used elsewhere in Office 365 (for instance, by data loss prevention policies) and the same concepts of defining the number of occurrences of the data type that must exist in a file or message together with the confidence level that the data type is what it seems to be are used to define when a match exists.

Defining Labels for Automatic Protection

Figure 1 shows the properties of a sensitivity label with auto-labeling enabled. In this case, the label will be applied to any document or file where a client detects the existence of a single credit card number. Typically, you combine this feature with content marking to apply a header or footer to warn users that sensitive data is present and encryption (if desired) to protect the information. The message displayed to the user is free-form text to communicate to users when their items are automatically labelled. In this case a suitable message might be “Automatic protection applied because this message contains a credit card number.”

Priority Dictates Which Label to Apply

It is possible that several sensitivity labels invoke automatic labeling and match against content in an item. When this happens, Office 365 applies the label with the highest priority as ordered in the sensitivity label policy published to the user. The first label in a policy has the lowest priority while the last has the highest priority (most sensitive).

Need to know more about Office 365 Sensitivity Labels? Look no further than Chapter 24 of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. It’s packed full of information on this topic.

Bit by Bit, Office 365 Sensitivity Labels Reaching Applications

On September 24, I published an article about the support of Office 365 Sensitivity Labels in the Office ProPlus for Windows desktop apps. At the time, I noted that Microsoft still had work to do to add support for sensitivity labels to the Office online apps, including OWA. Microsoft had published Office 365 notification MC191074 to say that Office 365 tenants now with worldwide roll-out complete by the end of October. Well, OWA “manual” support for Office 365 Sensitivity Labels has turned up in my tenant to satisfy roadmap item 44921.

Manual Labeling

Manual support for Office 365 Sensitivity Labels means that OWA users must decide what messages to label and the labels to assign to messages. Automatic labeling is what happens today with Office 365 retention labels when conditions in a policy control what items labels are applied to by a background process. Similar facilities are likely for sensitivity labels in the future.

Apply Sensitivity Labels in the OWA New Message Window

Because OWA runs in online mode, it always uses the current set of sensitivity labels published for a user. This doesn’t mean that a new or updated label is available to OWA immediately a change is made. The Security and Compliance Center must publish the change to all Office 365 workloads and clients. It can therefore take some time before a change is available to OWA.

The Sensitivity button is available as an option in the OWA new message window. After a label is applied to a message, its name is shown in the banner above the message recipients. In Figure 1 we can see that the selected label invokes encryption because of the padlock icon beside the label name. A label that only applies marking or does nothing but act as a visual indicator uses a plain label icon.

OWA also displays these icons for labelled items in the read message window. Like Outlook, the protection applied to a message also applies to any of its attachments

Labeling Replies

Sensitivity labels can also be applied to replies to messages that aren’t previously labelled. In this case, the Sensitivity option to apply a label is in the […] menu of the reply message window (Figure 2).

When you assign a sensitivity label to a reply, it does not apply to the previous messages in the thread. However, Exchange automatically assigns the same label to future messages in the thread.

Encrypt-Only and Do Not Forward

The default Office 365 Message Encryption Encrypt-Only and Do Not Forward templates can also be used to protect messages with OWA. Click the […] menu and you’ll find Encrypt in the list of menu choices. Using these templates for protection does not assign a sensitivity label to the protected messages.

Still Work to Do

Now that OWA supports Office 365 Sensitivity Labels, it’s reasonable to expect that the other Office online apps will offer support soon. After that, eyes will turn to the SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business browser interfaces to see how Microsoft will introduce sensitivity label support there.

For more information about Office 365 Sensitivity Labels and the underlying Azure Information Protection technology, read Chapter 24 of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook.

Filtered Email Views for Your Most Important Contacts

Over the years, Microsoft has made many attempts to help people access Inbox contents more intelligently, mostly by applying views to isolate and highlight important messages. The Clutter feature appeared in 2014 only to be replaced by the Focused Inbox in 2016. Now we have Outlook People Favorites.

Favorites have been around for years. Folder favorites give fast access to the most important parts of a user’s mailbox while favorite categories allow users to find messages tagged in particular categories. Outlook does this by creating a view within the mailbox to find all messages in the selected category. People favorites are like categories in that when you add someone (an email address) as a favorite, Outlook creates a view to find all messages from that person. It’s as simple as that.

Creating and Managing People Favorites

People favorites are designed to give quick and simple access to messages from those who are important to you, like your direct manager or critical customers. To mark someone as a people favorite, use OWA to select a message where they are a recipient or sender and click their email address to expose their people card. In Figure 1, I’ve selected David Los, who works on OWA (seems appropriate). To make David one of my people favorites, I clicked the star beside his name in the people card.

You can manage the set of people favorites through OWA’s People section. People and Groups are managed together (Figure 2). Favorite categories are managed through OWA options. To remove someone from the set of people favorites, deselect the star opposite their name.

Behind the scenes, Exchange Online creates a folder in the non-IPM section of the mailbox to hold pointers to items relating to the favorite. The folder is stored under the FavoritePersonas root. We can see details of the folders by running these PowerShell commands:

$Folders = Get-ExoMailboxFolderStatistics -id mailboxi-id -FolderScope nonipm -IncludeOldestAndNewestItems | Select Name, Itemsinfolder, NewestItemReceivedDate, FolderPath
$Folders | ?{$_.FolderPath -Like "*FavoritePersonas*"}|  sort  {$_.NewestItemReceivedDate -as [datetime]} -desc | Format-Table ItemsInFolder, Name

ItemsInFolder Name                                                   NewestItemReceivedDate
------------- ----                                                   ----------------------
          209 James Redmond_b4b30d32-ba9a-4d9b-ad76-7bdb3b6b6c51     09/12/2019 15:20
          222 Thomas Bowers_6701c170-5c66-4ded-ac00-5e083d2ab648     03/12/2019 14:33
           37 Mary-Jo Smith_589ac9ce-da38-45e2-b2b4-24950fb1c270     05/12/2019 09:55
           59 Brad Jones_9607102f-465a-48d9-846b-a3dd7cb9cdb8        01/11/2019 11:00
           40 David Los_078e789e-fa0a-4e98-bb83-ca81ff9a54ca         07/11/2019 23:15
            0 Steven Phillips_9a81d5c0-055e-400e-a0cb-9b43e21c93e7

The items in the persona folders are not updated in real-time. Instead, a background mailbox assistant processes the mailbox to find matching items and creates items for display when the favorite is accessed. The items in the favorite folder might therefore be a little behind. The folder listed above with zero items is just added and hasn’t yet been processed by the assistant.

Using People Favorites

People favorites show up in the set of resources available to OWA users, just like favorite folders and categories. In Figure 3, you can see that my favorites include some categories, groups, and people. Because Exchange Online generates views for favorites, we see unread counts for groups and people where unread messages exist in the mailbox. Selecting a people favorite displays the messages from that person inside the mailbox.

Mobile People Favorites

OWA boasts the most complete implementation but the favorites also appear in Outlook mobile. Figure 4 shows how people favorites appear in Outlook for iOS. You can also create new people favorites in Outlook mobile, but although the favorite is created I have found that Exchange Online sometimes doesn’t generate the view, so when you select the favorite created in Outlook mobile, you see no messages.

Outlook mobile clients don’t use the hidden mailbox folders to reveal items for about people favorites. Instead, these clients search the mailbox and synchronize items on an on-demand basis, an implementation which is more in line with the synchronization model used to update folders for other Outlook mobile resources.

No People Favorites for Outlook Desktop

Outlook desktop doesn’t support people favorites. This isn’t surprising. The Outlook desktop UI is notoriously difficult to change, which is why features that need UI updates invariably appear in OWA and Outlook mobile first.

Need help to keep track of changes in Office 365? It can be really hard to track small but important changes in client user interfaces, which is why Office 365 for IT Pros can help. We’ve been tracking changes like this for six years and are pretty good at it by now.

The new OWA has been generally available since February 2019. Office 365 Notification MC184484 brings the news that Microsoft will start the process of making the new OWA (Outlook on the Web as Microsoft Marketing insists on calling the browser client; most normal people call it Outlook Web Access) the default from July 22. Apparently, removing the toggle switch to allow people to move back and forth between the old and new interfaces counts as an added feature, so it’s on the Office 365 Roadmap (Figure 1).

New OWA Still in Development

Since first introducing the new OWA, Microsoft has gradually rolled out new functionality like dark mode, a new Office 365 Groups management interface, and supporting categories as favorites. On July 3, Microsoft posted a list of what they consider to be highlights in the new OWA together with some things that are coming. One new feature that struck me is “expressions” or the ability to past graphics into email to clutter up mailboxes even more. I guess we need some more help to fill Exchange Online’s massive 100 GB mailboxes.

Before being too critical about features like expressions, you must always remember that OWA serves both business (Office 365) and consumer (Outlook.com) users and features that seem odd in a business context often make absolute sense for consumers. “Joyful animations” is an example of a consumer-centric feature that probably wouldn’t influence a CIO (but it might make them happy on their birthday).

Development continues to add new features and because there are still parts of the old OWA that don’t appear in the new, such as being able to see address lists and the ability for users to manage their own distribution lists [update: this feature was due to be available to targeted release tenants on July 3 but some provisioning issues stopped the code being delivered to all. The problem is now fixed.]

Another gap, but one likely to affect fewer users, is that the new OWA doesn’t load the add-in needed to process messages captured for review by Office 365 supervision policies. In this case, the easy (and better) answer is to process these items in the Security and Compliance Center.

Timing

In terms of when all this happens, Microsoft says: “We will start rolling out the new Outlook on the web as the default experience on July 22nd to Targeted Release customers, and following with non Targeted Release customers on August 3rd, the roll out will be completed for all customers by the end of September 2019.”

The one caveat is for Tasks, where people who use the older form of Tasks (aka “the classic Tasks experience“) will continue to see that for now. Those who moved to the new To-Do based Tasks interface will continue to use it (Figure 2). Apart from the UI, the giveaway is the URL https://to-do.office.com/?fromOwa=true. Apparently, a “later communication” will bring news about the toggle that moves users back and forth between the other OWA components and To-Do. Stay tuned for developments on this front.

Too many Office 365 changes giving you a headache? Take the strain away by subscribing to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook and let us do the heavy lifting.

Manage the Settings of Office 365 Groups through OWA

Given the attention Microsoft dedicates to Teams, it’s sometimes difficult to remember that many people use Outlook Groups via OWA or Outlook as their collaboration platform. An Outlook group is an Office 365 Group that stores conversations in the group mailbox instead of Teams or Yammer. Although more people tend to use Outlook than OWA as their full-time client, the restricted nature of the Outlook user interface makes it difficult to introduce new Outlook Groups features. On the other hand, OWA is in a perpetual state of development and evolution, and every time you look at the browser client, it seems to have changed slightly.

OWA group management has never been particularly strong, but now it’s been revamped in the new version of OWA. The new Groups management UI is revealed through the Manage Groups section in OWA’s email tab or in the Groups section of OWA’s People tab.

Group members and owners can see details of the groups they belong to (including group membership), perform actions like leave the group, and access the different resources associated with a group. Members can also create invitations for others to join a group. Invitations to public

Owner Settings

Owners have additional options as they can edit the group settings and take care of any issues that need action to maintain the group. For example, in Figure 1 we see that the group is under the control of the Office 365 Groups expiration policy (explained in Chapter 10) and that it is due to expire in 18 days. The owner can renew the group or, if the group has served its function and is no longer needed, allow it to expire and go into the removal cycle. During the cycle, owners have 30 days during which they can recover a deleted group. To do this, open the Deleted link under Groups, select the group you want to restore, and click the Restore button.

Notice that OWA puts groups with outstanding actions at the top of the list. We can see that one of the flagged groups has a pending join request while the others are awaiting renewal.

Other Ways of Managing Group Settings in OWA

The group management interface isn’t the only place you can edit group settings. If you open a group in the Mail section of OWA and click the member link, you see the UI shown in Figure 2 and the option to edit group settings is in the […] menu.

You can also click on a group’s card to expose the Edit group option. The same UI and capabilities are displayed in both cases.

Although you can’t do everything to manage group settings through OWA, the new group management UI is a major improvement to the previous interface. You still have to use PowerShell for some management operations for Office 365 Groups, but not as many as you had to before.

Need to know more about Office 365 Groups? We dedicate two chapters of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook to Office 365 Groups, and even more if you count the chapter on using PowerShell to manage Office 365 Groups and Teams.

Do You Really Want OWA Users to Access Third Party File Providers?

Those who browse the deep recesses of Microsoft documentation often find unannounced pleasures awaiting their delight. Such is the case of Set-OWAMailboxPolicy, where the ThirdPartyFileProvidersEnabled setting is documented. Despite the best efforts of Vasil Michev (the esteemed technical editor of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook), the setting seems to be not well known. It deserves more.

By default, the setting is false, which means that OWA users can’t access third-party file providers like Box, Google Drive, or Dropbox to upload attachments. Before users can access a third-party file provider, they must authenticate their account (including an MFA challenge if MFA is enabled for the account) and give access to OWA.

Once the connection is made between the third-party file provider and OWA, the user can browse for attachments. Here’s what it looks like for a Dropbox account.

Goodness and Badness

There’s goodness and badness in allowing users to access third-party file providers. It’s good that they attach files stored in the providers to bring them into Exchange Online and so expose the content to Office 365 data governance. It’s bad if it encourages the long-term use of third-party file providers for business information. Each organization will have to make up its mind how to handle the situation and decide if they want to enable access to other file services.

Discovering Who Can Use Third-Party File Providers

To check what OWA mailbox policies allow access to third-party file providers, use the command:

Get-OwaMailboxPolicy | Format-Table Name, ThirdPartyFileProvidersEnabled

Name                       ThirdPartyFileProvidersEnabled
----                       ------------------------------
OwaMailboxPolicy-Default                             True
Restricted Download Access                          False
OWAFullAccess                                        True
NoOfflineAccess                                      True

We can see that three of the OWA mailbox policies allow third-party file providers. To discover the mailboxes covered by these policies, use the command:

Get-Mailbox -RecipientTypeDetails UserMailbox | Get-CasMailbox |? {$_.OWAMailboxPolicy -ne "Restricted Download Access"} | Format-Table DisplayName

We use Get-Mailbox to feed a filtered list of user mailboxes (excluding room, shared, discovery, and resource mailboxes) to Get-CasMailbox, check what OWA mailbox policy applies to each , and output a list of names. Simple!

For more information about OWA (but not third-party file providers), see Chapter 10 of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook.

Little Things (Like MailTips) in Exchange Cause Irritation

Sometimes Office 365 drives me up the wall. It’s usually when little things don’t work like they should rather than problems with big pieces of functionality. The different ways that Exchange Online and clients handle MailTips is a current irritant.

Usually I don’t think too much about MailTips. They’ve been part of the product since Exchange 2010 and usually don’t cause any fuss or bother. Recently, Microsoft introduced a new tip in Outlook Mobile to warn users when they add a recipient to a message who’s outside the tenant. It’s a good idea that isn’t dependent on the transition to the new connection protocol for Outlook mobile, unlike many of the new mobile features Microsoft hopes to deliver in the future.

But curiously, Outlook for iOS shows different warnings depending on how the MailTips settings in Exchange Online’s organization configuration are set. On the left, we see the warning shown when the setting to disable MailTips is set, on the right, the different warning that appears when the setting is enabled.

The external recipient warning is the only one of the MailTips supported by Exchange Online displayed by Outlook Mobile.

Organization MailTips Configuration

The controls to turn MailTips on or off are in the organization configuration and can be set by running the Set-OrganizationConfig cmdlet. In this case, the settings of interest are:

• MailTipsAllTipsEnabled: Enable or disable Mail Tips. The default is True.
• MailTipsExternalRecipientsTipsEnabled: Enable or disable the tip that a message is going to an external addressee. The default is True.

Although I can’t think of any good reason to disable the warning for external recipients, it doesn’t seem right for Outlook Mobile to ignore a perfectly good setting. After all, if a setting can be set to False, then the clients that are supposed to respond to the setting should do so. The reason might lie in the fact that Outlook Mobile supports a setting to control the display of the external recipient tip in its application configuration policy. That is, if you use Intune.

Another setting (MailTipsLargeAudienceThreshold) allows an organization to set a threshold for a large recipient list (25 is the default) to warn someone when they’re about to send a message to a large group. The original idea was to warn people when they addressed messages to large distribution lists. And another (MailTipsMailboxSourcedTipsEnabled) controls whether warnings appear when people are out of the office or their mailbox quota is exceeded.

Outlook’s MailTips Settings

Possibly for historic reasons (because these settings go back to Outlook 2010), Outlook has its own controls for MailTips. Go to Options, Mail, and find the MailTips section. You can choose to never see MailTips or the selection of MailTips you want Outlook to display.

Neither OWA nor Outlook Mobile offer the same degree of control over the display of MailTips.

Differences in OWA

OWA doesn’t offer the same control over MailTips as Outlook does. Apart from this, the only issue I have with OWA is that the “new” version of OWA doesn’t display a warning if a message exceeds the 25 “large audience” threshold. Given that we’re in the middle of a transition between client versions, this is probably an oversight that Microsoft will address before they switch everyone to the new version.

Commonality Across Outlook Family

I’ve no doubt that some will be unaffected or won’t care about the variation in treatment of MailTips that exists across the Outlook clients. The fact that Outlook has its own set of controls doesn’t bother me, but I am irritated that the clients don’t all handle MailTips in the same way. It seems that Microsoft could do a better job of smoothing the differences across the different clients.

Note that it can take some time before changed settings in a tenant’s Exchange Online organization configuration become effective. OWA usually picks up changes first followed by Outlook and Outlook Mobile.

We try not to show irritation in the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. That’s why we have this blog – to share some of the feelings that we otherwise hide.

New OWA: A Crisp, Clean Feeling

The updated version of OWA is now generally available, which means that it is now available in all Office 365 tenants. The new design is fresh and attractive and includes some nice new features, such as supporting Outlook categories in its favorite list, not to mention dark mode, the ability to schedule Teams meetings, and other new stuff.

On the other hand, some features from the older interface haven’t yet made it across to the new version. However, most of what’s not there could be regarded as nice to have rather than essential, and the new client is more than ready for use.

OWA’s Extra Tabs

While those who know how to use the old OWA won’t encounter much difficulty finding their way around the new, one behavioral change is already causing some comments. In the old OWA, when you switch from mail to calendar, the same tab is used within the browser. The new OWA launches a separate tab. Although this allows you to quickly move between calendar and email, you can end up with multiple tabs open for OWA.

The OWA Toggle

Because the new OWA is generally available, Microsoft has updated the UI of the old client to display a toggle switch to select the new OWA.
Toggling the switch on causes OWA to refresh and load the new interface. Toggling off reverts to the old UI.

As during the preview of the new OWA, administrators can control the display of the toggle switch with the OutlookBetaToggleEnabled setting in the OWA mailbox policy assigned to mailboxes. If True, OWA displays the toggle. If false, the toggle is invisible. If you look at the OWA mailbox policies in your tenant, you’ll find that Microsoft has enabled the toggle for all policies.

Controlling the New OWA Toggle

Some tenants will want to stop people using the new OWA in order to allow help desk and documentation to be prepared. This is easily done by switching the setting to False. For example, to do this for all policies, run the command:

Get-OWAMailboxPolicy | Set-OWAMailboxPolicy -OutlookBetaToggleEnabled $False

You might then assign a new OWA mailbox policy with the switch enabled to users that need to access the new UI for testing. Let’s assume that this policy is called OWAFullAccess. To set the switch in the policy and assign it to a mailbox, run the commands:

Set-OWAMailboxPolicy -Identity OWAFullAccess -OutlookBetaToggleEnabled $True
Set-CASMailbox -Identity Sanjay.Patel -OWAMailboxPolicy OWAFullAccess

Because Exchange Online caches client settings, it normally takes about 15 minutes before the assignment of an OWA policy to a mailbox or changing a setting in an OWA policy is effective.

If you disable the toggle to stop people enabling the new OWA, anyone who has already switched the toggle to on won’t be able to revert to the older interface because the toggle disappears. A small edge case to consider…

We cover OWA among the other Exchange clients in Chapter 10 of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook.

Four Months of Maturing OWA

Microsoft started to talk up the new version of OWA at Ignite 2018. Since then, the interface has gradually improved and built out in terms of supported features. The time this has taken puzzles some who think that OWA is based on the Outlook.com browser client (which it fundamentally is), but there’s a host of enterprise-class features in OWA like making categories into favorites that are not available in Outlook.com, and those take time to get right. At least, that’s what it seems.

Scheduling a Teams Meeting with OWA

One of the new features is the ability to schedule a Teams meeting from OWA. The current version of OWA supports scheduling a Skype for Business Online meeting but knows nothing about Teams. Outlook desktop has a Teams add-in that works well if you start Outlook when the Teams desktop client is connected to your home tenant. If not (for instance, you’re connected as a guest to another tenant), the add-in fails to appear.

With the new OWA, the option to schedule a Teams meeting appears as an option (see below). The actual link to join the meeting is added when the meeting invitation is sent. It doesn’t matter what tenant your Teams desktop client is connected to at the time because OWA always connects to your home tenant to schedule the meeting.

OWA’s Dark Mode

Another popular feature in the new OWA is dark mode, which seems to be quite the thing in browser apps today. Some will like this very much, others won’t care for it at all. I have yet to make my mind up.

Joy in Email

The Joyful Animations setting attracted my attention. This is a new OWA setting that promises that “Outlook will show a celebratory burst of colorful shapes in the reading pane when you open a message that includes words like Happy Birthday and Congratulations.” Like dark mode, this setting also appears in Outlook.com and is an example of technology transferring from a consumer service to the enterprise service. Discuss among yourselves whether the transfer is useful…

Naturally expecting that great things would happen, I instantly sent a message of congratulations to another user. Unhappily, the feature must depend on some processing (maybe server-side) that’s not yet enabled within Office 365 and no joy ensued. The feature works in Outlook.com when suitably joyous terms are highlighted in messages. Clicking on a highlighted term generates the promised “burst of colorful shapes.” You can amuse yourself for hours by clicking on terms to see the shapes…

Turn On The Lights

When reading email containing birthday wishes, I had the chance to show off the ability to turn on and off dark mode when reading messages (cutely called turning on (bright) and off (dark) the lights).

The new OWA isn’t ready for prime time yet and users must be assigned an OWA mailbox policy to expose the choice to see the new mode, but the new client is coming and will be the default soon. Changing client interfaces can be a challenge for help desk, user documentation, and users. If you haven’t yet looked into the new OWA, maybe now’s a good time to have a peek.

Unless of course you run an Exchange on-premises server. There’s no sign at present that Microsoft will bring the new OWA to Exchange 2019, but stranger things have happened…

We cover OWA and other Office 365 clients in Chapter 10 of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. And like everything else in the book, we’ll update our text about OWA when the new client makes its mainstream debut. We might leave the bit about colorful shapes out…

Sometimes you’re told things that turn out to be incorrect, which is what happened when I originally wrote this post. I was asked why OWA displayed logos and turned to some contacts in Microsoft, one of whom told me that the answer was BIMI. As it turns out, that answer was wrong. I should have checked further, but didn’t. Now that I have found out the real answer, I document it here.

BIMI: Helping to Highlight Good Email

Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) is a standardized method for companies to publish their brand logos online so that the logos can be used in applications like email. The idea is that users will be more easily able to recognize messages from companies by seeing their logos when the logos are displayed in applications. A draft industry-wide standard  for BIMI is available.

BIMI Logos in DNS

The BIMI logo information is published in a DNS resource record. The record includes a link to the graphic file for an SVG-formatted logo. Email and other applications then retrieve the logo from DNS and load it alongside other message data such as Inbox lists and message windows.

It’s worth underlining that BIMI builds on and does not replace existing email authentication mechanisms such as SPF and DMARC. Reputable organizations should always publish SPF and DMARC records to allow receiving domains to authenticate inbound email. For more information about BIMI, head to the Brand Indicators site.

Microsoft’s Business Profile Program

Interesting as BIMI is, Microsoft does not participate in the BIMI initiative. Instead, they have their own approach called “brand cards,” which serve much the same purpose without using DNS. Instead, businesses sign up with the Microsoft Business Profile program, which is currently in beta.

When a company signed up, they give Microsoft a verified icon that is used by OWA in Office 365 and Outlook.com. As you can see below, the logos for Microsoft and Fitbit show up in OWA, which means that these organizations have business profiles, while Carrefour or Parking Tag do not. Outlook desktop and Outlook mobile do not yet support the display of brand cards. Because the program uses Bing, some brand cards are generated for well-known organizations.

The BIMI initiative could become an industry standard. Microsoft’s business profile program is definitely led by Microsoft. Whether the two will come together in the future is open for debate.

Nothing for an Office 365 Admin to do

You don’t have to do anything inside Office 365 before OWA displays brand logos as this is under the control of the email program and depends on whether a brand card exists for an organization. In fact, you can’t stop OWA displaying the logos.

SPF and DMARC are discussed at length in Chapter 17 of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook along with lots of other great information about anti-malware techniques.

Bright, Shiny, and New

Today’s Petri.com article covers the new user interface for Outlook Web App (OWA). As with any software that’s under active development, there are some glitches and missing features, but overall the new design looks solid.

In some ways, this is to be expected because Microsoft tried out the new UI framework when it launched the new interface for Outlook.com. As you probably know, Outlook.com and Exchange Online share the same infrastructure, so in one sense it is relatively easy for Microsoft to transfer the work to the commercial platform. However, even though many features are common to both platforms, the functionality of OWA differs from Outlook.com, so considerable effort is needed to make sure that all features support the new framework.

Open Source Components

Some observers have claimed that the new interface is based on React.js. It’s absolutely true that the new OWA uses React.js, but it’s equally true that many other open source components are used too.

The new OWA is in targeted release for now. As it matures and functionality is complete, it will move into general availability. Once that happens, probably close to the end of 2018 or early 2019, you’ll have about 60 days to make the transition from the old UI. The extended period is intended to allow tenants to prepare help desk, documentation, and anything else needed to support users.

Chapter 10 is where we talk about clients in the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. Then again, clients pop up all through the book, so there’s plenty to read.

Fetching Information from LinkedIn

Today’s Petri.com article explores to connection between Azure Active Directory and LinkedIn that permits Office 365 users to see LinkedIn profile data in people cards for contacts viewed through OWA and other browser applications.

It’s a nice integration and it’s done in a way that preserves personal privacy. Apart from the tenant deciding that the link can happen and for whom, it’s up to each user to decide whether to connect their Office 365 account with their LinkedIn account to fetch data. In other words, the connection is completely under the control of users.

Once the connection is established, you see a LinkedIn logo appear in people cards (the card shown with details of a person, such as their email address and phone number). This only happens in browser apps because the desktop apps haven’t yet been updated.

If you click the LinkedIn logo, Office 365 tries to find a match for the person in LinkedIn using their email address and name. It’s possible that several matches (or none) are found, in which case the user is asked to choose the best match.

Some will find this integration invaluable. Some will hate it. And many will ignore it because they’re not interested in consulting LinkedIn about anything. But I suspect that a reasonable population of Office 365 users will like to have the chance to view career information about internal and external recipients. After all, that information isn’t held anywhere else in your tenant’s Azure Active Directory.

For more information about the LinkedIn integration with Office 365, read Chapter 3 of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook.

Encrypt Only

In March 2018, Microsoft introduced the ability for Office 365 users to use the Encrypt Only feature to encrypt email sent from Outlook 2016 and OWA. Part of Office 365 Message Encryption and included in the Office 365 E3 and E5 plans (also available as an add-on), the idea behind the Encrypt Only feature is to avoid the need for people to use S/MIME to protect their outbound email. Messages encrypted by Office 365 can be read by recipients in any email service.

Introducing DecryptAttachmentForEncryptOnly

On August 23, Microsoft updated the Information Rights Management (IRM) configuration for tenants with a new setting called DecryptAttachmentForEncryptOnly. The new setting controls if Exchange Online decrypts attachments of messages protected with Encrypt Only when opened by authenticated users.

The default is False, meaning that attachments remain protected when downloaded (Figure 1). In other words, the sender exerts control over the file.

Change the setting to True if you want recipients to be able to do whatever they want after they download attachments. To update, connect to Exchange Online with PowerShell and run the command:

Set-IRMConfiguration -DecryptAttachmentForEncryptOnly $True

Changes made to the IRM configuration are effective tenant-wide immediately.

No Online Edits for OWA

If you opt for unrestricted access, be aware that users cannot perform an online edit of an Office attachment protected by Encrypt Only with OWA. You’d expect that this would be the case, but OWA preserves encryption unless an attachment is downloaded. So if you click Preview for an Office attachment and then click Edit and reply, you’ll see:

The workaround is to download any attachment you want to edit as this forces Exchange Online to decrypt the file.

The DecryptAttachmentFromPortal Setting

The DecryptAttachmentFromPortal setting was introduced some time ago to allow recipients who don’t have an Azure Active Directory account (services such as Gmail, Yahoo!, and Yandex) to access encrypted message attachments. This setting is now deprecated in favor of DecryptAttachmentForEncryptOnly.

No Other IRM Templates Affected

The DecryptAttachmentForEncryptOnly setting only applies to attachments for messages sent using the Encrypt Only feature. They don’t apply to attachments protected with any other rights management template.

One Configuration

The new setting allows tenants to control how recipients interact with attachments protected by the Encrypt Only feature. It’s worth emphasizing that the IRM configuration applies tenant-wide and you cannot change a setting for one message, one sender, or a recipient. Once you change a setting, it applies for all messages.

For more information about protecting email and documents, see Chapter 24 of Office 365 for IT Pros.