Tony Redmond

A report prepared for the Dutch Government slams Microsoft for GDPR personal data violations discovered in Office 2016 and Office 365. The best intentions lie behind the amount of telemetry sent back to Microsoft for user actions and the audit data gathered by Office 365, but GDPR makes it clear that personal data must be protected, and Microsoft might be failing.

Microsoft plans to deliver new migration tools to move Google G Suite email, contact, and calendar data to Office 365 (which means Exchage Online) by Q2 2019. The new tools are likely to move from the existing implementation built around the antique IMAP4 protocol, which only covers email and is prone to throttling by Google.

Microsoft has made privileged access management (PAM) generally available for Office 365, but in reality it’s only Exchange Online that supports the new feature. This isn’t surprising because Exchange has a well-developed role-based access control system that the PAM developers can leverage, but it does pose a question about how they’ll extend PAM to other Office 365 workloads.

Microsoft has updated the Teams PowerShell module to version 0.9.5. The best thing about the refresh is that the Get-Team cmdlet works. Well, it can now retrieve a full list of Teams in an Office 365 tenant. It would be good if Get-Team returned more data and supported server-side filtering, but it’s a start.

Teams borrows from many other Office 365 applications to build its functionality.The latest component taken is Exchange Online address book policies, used to segment the directory and stop users getting in touch with other people in the organization outside the scope of a policy. But it’s an imperfect and partial block, and if you really want to stop people talking, you’ll have to do a lot more work.

Do you need to backup Office 365 data? The question isn’t simple because technology changes all the time and it’s hard to backup some applications like Teams and Planner because APIs don’t exist. The important thing is for companies to review what data they use, the features available to them, and then figure out if any gaps exist.

Teams is a great place to host conversations, but sometimes certain messages need to be purged. It’s easy for a team owner to remove something offensive from a single channel, but what happens if someone posts in multiple channels across multiple teams. As it turns out, some manual intervention is needed.

Office 365 now has 155 monthly active users and is gaining new users at over 3 million seats per month. That’s impressive by any measure, with growth fueled by migrations from on-premises servers, new customer wins, and the influence of new applications like Teams.

Microsoft has shipped Exchange 2019, the latest in a long line of enterprise-class email servers stretching back to 1996. The latest version runs on Windows Server 2019 and Microsoft recommends that you use Server Core. There’s fewer people using on-premises servers today, but those that do can install the best email server in the business.

Many Office 365 applications (Teams, Groups, Planner, SharePoint, etc.) now support external guest access. you might end up with a lot of guests, and like any good accommodation, some management is needed. In this article, we look at how to manage the guests created by Office 365.