Tony Redmond profile picture

Follow Tony

Tony Redmond

Petri Contributor

Tony Redmond has written thousands of articles about Microsoft technology since 1996. He covers Office 365 and associated technologies for Petri.com and is also the lead author for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook, updated monthly to keep pace with change in the cloud.

LATEST

Competition and Adoption Driving Microsoft to Linux Client for Teams

Lots of hot air and fuss resulted when Microsoft confirmed on the Teams UserVoice site that they are actively working on a Teams client for Linux. Many Office 365 tenants will be bemused at the attention this topic received, but competition with Slack and the need to drive faster adoption in Teams deployments are compelling reasons for Microsoft to do this work. We can only hope that the project results in better Teams clients all round.

View Article

Office 365 Tenants Get Option to Move Video to Stream

A self-service migration process to move content from the Office 365 Video portal to Microsoft Stream is now rolling out. The wizard-driven process is easy and efficient and doesn’t have too many problems. In fact, the biggest issue facing Office 365 tenants might be finding the time to review all the migrated content before the go live date for Stream comes around.

View Article

Exploiting the Graph When PowerShell Can’t Do Enough for Teams

Although Teams has a PowerShell module, its cmdlets can’t get at some of the interesting information for team objects. But the Graph API reveals that information. Combining the Graph with PowerShell makes it possible to retrieve the information with just a little effort. A working example helps make the point, so here’s a script to report the Teams channels with email addresses.

View Article

SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Azure B2B Collaboration

SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business are making increasing use of Azure B2B Collaboration for sharing, which means that Office 365 tenants will have more guest user accounts. Using Azure B2B Collaboration is a reasonable approach because it’s secure and works well, but it does mean that tenant admins have some extra work to do to keep an eye on those guest accounts.

View Article

Office 365 Group Expiration Policy Auto-Renews Based on User Activity

The original Office 365 Groups expiration policy was pretty good. It helps tenants keep control of potential group sprawl by removing old groups based on age. Now the policy takes user activity into account. While still not perfect, the new implementation makes the group expiration policy even easier to use because owners don’t have to do anything to renew their groups if the groups remain in active use. You might debate the set of activities chosen by Microsoft to represent a good signal of group activity, but not the way the policy now works.

View Article

Teams User Surveys Pose Privacy Concerns for Office 365 Tenants

According to Office 365 notification MC187538, Microsoft plans to start asking users to give feedback about Teams in pop-up surveys within the app to help Microsoft improve functionality. That all sounds OK until you consider that Microsoft will control the data it obtains from users and tenants will have no insight into what their users have told Microsoft. That’s not right.

View Article

When Technology Fails: Woes With SharePoint Online Restore this Library

It’s great when Microsoft introduces new functionality to SharePoint Online to make the lives of administrators and users easier, which is what the Restore this library feature is all about. Then problems happen, and we understand where the flaw lines exist. Recovering from a recent ransomware attack caused one Office 365 tenant more problems than they thought likely because Restore this library didn’t work as well as expected.

View Article

Exchange Online Exposes New Mailbox Activity Data

Microsoft has updated the vererable Get-MailboxStatistics cmdlet in Exchange Online PowerShell to return a bunch of new mailbox activity properties. The properties cover different activities like email and calendar, but the problem with the LastLogon property remains and you still need to do some extra work to get accurate last login information for a user.

View Article

BitTitan Introduces Cross-Tenant Teams Migration

Moving Teams between Office 365 tenants has been a challenge since the earliest days of Teams. Now a beta Graph API has allowed BitTitan to create the ability to transfer team settings and channel conversations between tenants. The migration isn’t perfect, but it’s a good start and will improve over time as BitTitan and other ISVs work out the best way to move Teams content around.

View Article

The Magic Behind OWA Likes

OWA is the only Outlook client that supports “Likes.” This begs the question how OWA supports likes and where the information about likes is stored. Some probing using easily accessible tools reveals the answer. You might think that the answer only interests Office 365 Trivial Pursuit nerds, but it’s actually of real interest to eDiscovery investigators.

View Article
Go to page