Surprise Announcement Highlights Inconsistencies Across Microsoft 365 Consoles

Microsoft’s 17 August announcement that they are not proceeding with support for dark mode in the Teams admin center (TAC) came as a surprise. Originally announced in message center notification MC567496 (2 Jun 2023), I covered the news briefly on June 6 and pointed out that dark mode for TAC had some problems with custom tenant colors. This didn’t seem like a big issue at the time. It’s the kind of fit-and-finish bug that tends to be taken care of before final release.

I don’t know why Microsoft decided not to deliver dark mode for TAC. Microsoft’s announcement simply says “We have made the decision not to proceed with this feature at this time,” which could mean anything. What’s for sure is that the toggle to enable dark mode has disappeared and won’t come back until Microsoft decides what to do next.

The news about TAC got me thinking about why Microsoft doesn’t have a common platform for Microsoft 365 administrative consoles. Despite efforts to make the consoles look and feel similar, the interfaces have their own foibles.

Authorization and Tokens

Take authorization as an example. The admin consoles use modern authentication, so the consoles need to acquire OAuth 2.0 access tokens and renew the tokens when they expire. Making token renewal a seamless experience for administrators seems to be a very complex technical challenge for the console developers.

The Microsoft 365 admin center manages things best. Behind the scenes, the console takes care of token renewal without a hitch. I seldom experience issues with this console, even after keeping the admin center open for extended periods. The SharePoint Online admin center is also pretty good. Other consoles struggle to deliver an elegant solution to token refresh.

For example, the new-and-improved Exchange admin center flashes errors up when it discovers the need to renew an expired token. Flash is the operative word because an error message appears and disappears in the blink of an eye. However, it’s there and I know it’s there and I worry that something more problematic than a brief pause in token renewal is the root cause. It seems like an issue that is highly solvable.

The Microsoft Purview compliance portal takes a more pedantic stance and insists that administrators should sign in regularly (Figure 1). At least you know where you are and what to do to proceed, and an arguable case exists that the compliance portal gives access to solutions that protect confidential information. But the inconsistency in behavior is obvious and jarring.

Teams Admin Center

And then we come to the Teams admin center. This console is fond of launching and appearing to work as normal before suddenly deciding that it should sign out the connected user (Figure 2). This action forces the user to reauthenticate before they can connect to TAC. And it can force the user to sign in again to other Microsoft 365 apps.

I’ve complained to Microsoft about TAC’s odd connection procedure several times. Each time I’m told things will improve. And to be fair to Microsoft, the issue occurs much less frequently now than it did in the past. Perhaps recent changes to the TAC contained some new code to address the problem. But I don’t trust TAC because I’ve experienced the sign-out issue within the last few weeks. I’m now keeping a watching brief on TAC to see if the issue reappears and if so, whether I can identify specific circumstances that might provoke the sign-out.

Dark Mode Support Across Admin Consoles

With the decision made not to support dark mode for TAC, the situation is that two of the five main Microsoft 365 admin consoles support dark mode while three do not:

• Support dark mode: Microsoft 365 admin center (Figure 3), Exchange Online admin center.
• Do not support dark mode: Teams admin center, Microsoft Purview compliance portal, SharePoint Online admin center.

The inconsistent implementation of dark mode is only an indication of the lack of consistency which still exists across the Microsoft 365 admin consoles. It demonstrates that Microsoft still has work to do to make Microsoft 365 administration a unified space. And when they’re doing that, making access token renewal work the same way across all consoles would be a great thing to do.

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

Deploying Technology to 100-plus Million Users

After the note about the launch of shared mailbox and dark mode support for Outlook mobile appeared, several people commented that they had the latest client but couldn’t access the shared mailbox feature. This prompted me to have a conversation with Microsoft to find out how they deploy new features to what is now a very large (100+ million as of May 2019) installed base.

Outlook Mobile has both consumer and commercial (Office 365) users. Some features, like dark mode, are available to both sets while others, like shared mailboxes, are only available to commercial customers. The deployment mechanism needs to take account of these factors.

Random Selection During Roll-Out

When Microsoft releases a new Outlook mobile feature, they select a random percentage of the worldwide installed base as the initial roll-out target. For features like dark mode intended for use by any Outlook mobile user, the random selection is formed of individual commercial and consumer users. Commercial-targeted features like shared mailboxes begin deployment to a random selection of Office 365 tenants. If the selection is user-based, selected users can access the new feature immediately while others in the same tenant must wait until the roll-out reaches them. If the select is tenant-based, everyone in the selected tenants can access the new feature once the tenant is enabled.

Eventually the roll-out reaches 100% and everyone who has the latest version of the Outlook mobile app (iOS or Android) can access the new feature. The exact timing from start to finish of a roll-out varies across features and depends on factors such as bug reports or problems detected in the telemetry Microsoft gathers from Outlook clients.

No Control for Office 365 Tenants

Office 365 tenant administrators can’t influence the selection of their tenant or users within their tenant to receive new Outlook mobile features early. There’s no equivalent of the Targeted Release capability that exists for Office 365 features. There’s also no way for a tenant administrator to know who in the tenant might have been randomly selected to receive early access to a new feature. One way of looking at this is to say that random selection is fair to everyone; another is to say that Microsoft should give tenants some control over how new client technology is deployed to their users. On balance, it seems to me that Microsoft should provide some way to control deployment of commercial features, perhaps as a setting available through the Office 365 Admin Center.

There’s also no way to disable one or more Outlook Mobile features on a selective user-by-user basis. This might be useful for commercial features where some tenants don’t want people to use certain capabilities (like shared mailboxes) on mobile devices.

Testflight Makes a Difference

Those who sign up for the Outlook Insiders program and use the Testflight version of Outlook for iOS are not restricted by the random selection process and can use new features as Microsoft deploys them to Testflight. This can lead to an interesting situation where a tenant account can access a new feature through Testflight while another account in the same tenant can’t when using the production version of Outlook for iOS.

Need to know more about Outlook Mobile and other Office 365 clients? The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook covers this topic in some detail!

Shared Mailboxes for All, Dark Mode for Some

After much anticipation, shared mailbox support is now generally available for Outlook mobile. You need three things in place to be able to add shared mailboxes:

• A suitable version: Outlook for iOS version 3.37 or later or Outlook for Android 3.0.134 or later.
• Back-end support for the Microsoft synchronization technology (see this article to see how to check if Outlook is using the new sync).
• Your account is enabled for the feature. My contacts at Microsoft say that the roll-out of shared mailboxes is now past 50% of all Office 365 tenants after some pauses to fix bugs.

With the prerequisites in place, you can add shared mailboxes as easily as adding any other mailbox. According to the Office 365 Roadmap, support for delegate access to mailboxes in Outlook Mobile is coming too (Q1 CY2020).

Outlook Mobile Goes Dark

In other news, Office 365 notification MC189044 (August 28) announces that dark mode is starting to roll out for Outlook Mobile. Version 4.1 of Outlook for iOS is now available to Outlook Insiders who can download beta versions through the Testflight app. Support for dark mode (Figure 1) brings Outlook mobile up to speed with its desktop and browser counterparts. Even after using the new software for just a few days, I like dark mode much more on mobile than I do on other platforms. It just seems more natural to use a darkened mobile app.

To throw some light into what Microsoft is doing (no pun intended), Jon Friedman, head of Office design, posted an article to explain the design principles in dark mode. This article tells us that Outlook will be able to manage dark mode automatically based on user preferences when iOS 13 and Android Q are available.

[Update September 9: A tweet by Michael Palermiti, head of product for Outlook, says that dark mode is now 100% deployed]

Enabling Dark Mode

To set dark mode in Outlook for iOS, go to preferences and select the option (Figure 2). You need to restart Outlook to make dark mode effective (I had to restart iOS, but I believe this is usually unnecessary).

When Your Client Can Go Dark

According to the Office 365 Roadmap, the planned release for dark mode is September 2019 for both iOS and Android. In the run-up to general availability, apparently Microsoft has enabled dark mode for a select group of non-Testflight users who run the most recently released client software. Roughly 10% of users are in this category, so if your device has version 4.0 of the iOS client or version 3.0.137 of the Android client, you might be able to select dark mode now. Have a look!

For more information about Outlook and other clients, read the chapter about Office 365 clients in 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…