Tony Redmond

Now Rolling Out Among the Message Center notifications posted before Microsoft closed for the holiday break is MC230569, which confirms that Advanced eDiscovery can decrypt content collected from SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. The update is Microsoft 365 roadmap item 68705 and will roll out to tenants in January 2021. It’s already in my…

Google’s battle with Microsoft for dominance in cloud application suites continues. New developments, new applications, and even new names keep the pace up as Office 365 and G Suite go head-to-head for customer loyalties.

A question none of us like to think about too much is what we would do if a natural or man-made disaster took out Office 365 and disrupted service for an extended period. The good news is that the way Microsoft has built out Office 365 into datacenter regions helps to limit the effect of any outage, but the fact still remains that something bad could happen. What would you do then?

The news that Microsoft is working on cloud signatures for Outlook for Windows is welcome. The venerable Outlook client has long stored its signature information in the system registry, which makes it hard to move signatures from PC to PC. On the other hand, OWA stores its signatures in mailboxes, so the same signature is used no matter where you log in. Of course, OWA is a simpler client (no profiles, for instance), but it should be eminently possible to store everything Outlook needs in the cloud. At least for Outlook clients connected to Exchange Online…

Microsoft has announced that Exchange Online and Outlook will soon synchronize email signatures across devices. Does this mean that the ISV market for email autosignature products is over? I don’t think so because there’s lots of other things to do with email signatures once device synchronization is handled.

Tracking Down Obsolete Accounts Last December, I wrote about how the problem of identifying obsolete guest accounts that exist in an Office 365 tenant. An increasing number of applications support Azure B2B Collaboration and create guest accounts to allow external people to access content. Teams is a great example, as are the sharing links used…

Very Useful Sensitivity Labels Microsoft has steadily been building out the ability of sensitivity labels to manage different aspects of containers (teams, groups, and sites), with the ability to control the external sharing capability for SharePoint Online team sites the latest addition (Figure 1). Image 1 Expand Figure 1: Defining external sharing capability in a sensitivity…

Excel fans delight! You can now export task data for a Planner plan to Excel and slice and dice the task information to your heart’s content. The new feature is likely to be popular with Office 365 users because it adds values and it makes sense to use Excel for this purpose, but another way of looking at it is that Planner is so poor at analysis and reporting that it needed external help. The truth probably lies in the middle.

PowerShell has its Limitations I like using PowerShell to work with Office 365 data, but sometimes PowerShell isn’t the right tool. It might be too slow, or a PowerShell cmdlet isn’t available to work with some data. Planner is a good example. People have asked about reporting the plans available to a user or the…

It’s hard to think of new features for an application like Word that has been around for so long. Adding something that nags the user to be more precise and concise wouldn’t seem like it would be popular, but I rather like the new “Editor” feature. And providing more context in spell checking is a good thing too!