Tony Redmond

Office 365 Message Encryption (OME) now offers an advanced set of features to Office 365 E5 tenants. You can have messages with specific branding delivered to different domains. Advanced OME also includes message revocation. Branding is a feature that will appeal to a limited set of tenants, but it would be nice if revocation was available to a wider set of Office 365 tenants.

Microsoft is rolling out priority notifications for Teams, the ability for users to send urgent messages in chats so that the recipients get notified every two minutes until they respond. Office 365 tenants (except GCC) should see the new functionality in July. Tenants can control who gets to send urgent messages with messaging policies, and some user education would be good to help those allowed to send these messages understand when a message is truly urgent.

You can add photos to Azure Active Directory guest accounts and have Office 365 apps display those photos. But it’s a lot of work to track down suitable photos for individual guests. If you want to change the default two-initial icon displayed by Office 365, you can use PowerShell to update all guest accounts with a photo. Here’s how I handled the problem.

PowerShell is a great way of automating common administrative Office 365 operations. That is, if you know what module to use and how to use the cmdlets in that module. Unfortunately things are a bit of a mess with too many modules and inconsistent behavior in areas like error handling. With so many development groups working on Office 365, the PowerShell situation might be inevitable, but it needs cleaning up.

The new version of MyAnalytics is available to Office 365 E3 and E5 users and takes a different approach to the interpretation of data gathered about user work activities inside different apps. Instead of telling you the raw counts of messages sent and read and other data, MyAnalytics gives insights to help people work smarter and achieve a better work-life balance.

After seeing a tweet about a site that could return the tenant identifier for any Azure or Office 365 tenant, I was a tad suspicious. After all, this data should be private – or so you’d think. In fact, the WhatIsMyTenantId.com site simply takes records available to enable OAuth 2.0 sign-ins and extracts the tenant identifier from their content. It’s an easy way to get hold of tenant identifiers.

Microsoft says that new Yammer networks can have their messages stored in the European Union instead of the U.S. That sounds good, until you understand the downside that Yammer loses a lot of its external collaboration capabilities. Given this, it’s likely that some existing EU-based Office 365 tenants who use Yammer will be happy to have their messages stay in the U.S.

You can easily rename a team by giving it a new display name, or do the same thing to a channel. But Teams and SharePoint Online have the kind of relationship that’s based on tight connections, so renaming team or channel names leaves SharePoint untouched. Site URLs remain unchanged and if you try and fix up the folder names for channels, you can end up with a real mess.

A recent report by a security vendor says that 25% of phishing messages get by Exchange Online Protection (EOP) and arrive into Office 365 user mailboxes. This highlights the need to configure EOP properly and run multiple lines of defense. Microsoft would like you to use Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) alongside EOP. Offerings from other security vendors are also available. For better protection against phishing, you should consider something like ATP.

Microsoft has moved the venerable EHLO blog maintained by the Exchange product group to the Microsoft Technical Community (MTC) platform. The first post is about the Exchange 2019 sizing calculator. Hopefully the changeover won’t affect the great content published in EHLO over the years. What’s of more concern is the lack of participation in the MTC by Microsoft product engineers and MVPs.