Tony Redmond

Microsoft made a ton of announcements at this week’s SharePoint conference in Las Vegas. If you’re an Office 365 tenant administrator, the health of SharePoint Online and what it and OneDrive for Business can do is important to you. Among all the fluffy stuff about intelligent intranets, there was some good news about improvements in administration, security, and network utilization, all of which will help other Office 365 apps too.

You can now connect Office 365 sources like SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Teams, and Yammer to Microsoft Search and have Bing reveal results from those sources in its searches. It’s a useful trick, as long as you use Bing as your search engine. And there’s the small matter that Microsoft has left Exchange out of the list of connected sources, which seems to reduce the usefulness of searches a tad.

You can now protect your Azure Active Directory account with a 256-character password, including spaces. This news will bring much joy to Office 365 administrators and others who hated the previous 16-character limit, but please don’t rush into forcing users to change their passwords without taking the time to pause and consider how best to proceed. Longer passwords are good, but they should be only one part of a strategy to protect user accounts.

Microsoft launched the preview of Entitlement Management, a new part of their Azure Active Directory Identity Governance program. The idea is that you can manage access to resources via policy, which seems to be a good thing, especially in large organizations where objects like Office 365 Groups, SharePoint Sites, and Teams might just get a little out of hand. The preview is interesting, but like all previews, it needs some work to be ready for prime time.

Turla, a Russian cyber-espionage group is reported as being behind an attack on Exchange on-premises servers that uses transport agents to capture and process messages for selected users. It’s an attack vector that hasn’t been seen before and raises the question of how often administrators should review transport agents active on their servers. The important point is that unless your network is compromised, hackers cannot install transport agents on Exchange servers and this attack is more theoretical than practical.

The PST is now a very old file format. Originally introduced to give users the ability to store email moved from their Exchange mailbox, the need for PSTs disappeared years ago because Office 365 users have massive mailboxes. Despite this, some organizations persist in allowing people to use PSTs.

Office ProPlus Version 1904 boasts new privacy controls and Microsoft has documented how it thinks about required and optional data collected from users. Office 365 still lacks privacy controls for the server apps. It remains to be seen if customers will be happy and consider that Microsoft has solved the GDPR issues identified in the Dutch DPIA report in November 2018.

If your Office 365 tenant has many private Teams, you might run the risk that people create duplicate teams because they don’t know that a team already exists. Teams doesn’t have a separate directory but you can create one with PowerShell and publish the output in Teams. The magic is provided by deep links, which users click to navigate to a team they want to join.

Microsoft released the generally available (1.0) version of the Teams PowerShell module on April 24. The Get-Team cmdlet receives a big makeover (and slowdown), but overall the module is solid and you shouldn’t need to make too many changes to scripts.

Microsoft announced the Files Restore feature for SharePoint Online on April 22. It’s the kind of news we can expect as the SharePoint conference draws near, and it’s good news for Office 365 tenants. Some backup vendors might not be so keen as Files Restore makes it a tad harder for them to sell their backups. Small Office 365 tenants also got the news that the new SharePoint Admin Center is becoming the default. The new portal might even be ready soon.