Tony Redmond

Some people worry that Exchange Online mailboxes could be compromised by ransomeware and people will be forced to pay BitCoin to decrypt their messages. It’s certainly a possibility, but out-of-the-box solutions exist if you’re unlucky enough to be infected. That is, if you’ve done the necessary up-front planning to prepare for the worst to happen.,

Microsoft has started to flag its intention to deprecate the Search-Mailbox cmdlet. It’s probably the right time to remove this cmdlet from Exchange Online because Office 365 compliance searches can serve the same purpose. At least, compliance searches can do most of what Search-Mailbox does faster. Some functionality gaps need to be filled before we can bid adieu to Search-Mailbox, but its time is coming.

In part 1 of this series, we discussed how to setup Office 365 Information Barriers. We now get to the practical application of those barriers to stop different user groups communicating with Teams. Chats and VOIP calls are blocked, users are removed from team membership, and generally everything works as you’d expect.

Office 365 Information Barriers allow organizations to erect logical firewalls between different user communities to ensure that regulatory and legal requirements are met. Teams and Exchange Online support Information Barrier policies, which replace Address Book Policies. Some work is necessary to get Information Barriers set up. We cover that work in this article and prepare the ground for deploying the policies to Teams.

Slack’s July 22 post reports some advances in their desktop client that seem to aim at reported weaknesses in the Teams desktop client. The best update is better protection against network outages. The other claims of 50% less RAM, 33% faster startup, and 10x better call joining need validation in the real world.

The need to download PDF files to work with them has been a longstanding irritation for SharePoint Online users. Now Microsoft and Adobe have come up with a new file handler that sends PDFs to the Adobe Document Cloud, where the files can be updated and sent back to SharePoint Online for storage. The changes look good in the standard file viewer too! Worth looking at…

Microsoft dug themselves out of a pit of pain last Friday when they reversed the decision to nix some popular partner benefit just before the Inspire conference in Las Vegas. However, the world is changing and the cloud is where the action is. Microsoft pays to deliver services from the cloud and that cost must be either absorbed internally or transmitted to partners. That simple fact makes it sure that difficult conversations await in the future.

In February, I published a script to report the activity in Office 365 Groups and Teams. It is natural that some of those groups will be obsolete, so here’s another script to email the owners of those groups. I know the script works because I tested it against 200 groups, but it’s rough and ready and deserves some TLC from people who really know PowerShell.

Microsoft’s decision to make its partners pay commercial rates for software licenses might seem logical at first glance, but it’s not helpful in a world where cloud technologies change so often. The problem I have is that anything that might prevent partners acquiring knowledge about Microsoft technologies is a bad thing for customers who depend on those partners. It should be interesting to see if any spirited debates happen at next week’s Inspire conference.

Microsoft introduced support for like reactions in OWA in 2015. Teams also supports likes, but it also supports other reactions to messages from sad to angry. Knowing how to use these reactions is a social minefield. On a serious notes, reactions are not currently stored in Teams compliance records in Exchange Online, which is a problem if people react to messages with likes.