Tony Redmond

At Microsoft Ignite 2019, the Exchange product group announced the public preview of a set of REST-based PowerShell cmdlets to replace some of the most popular (and in performance terms, most painful) traditional cmdlets. The new cmdlets are more reliable and robust and run 2-4 times faster than the older Remote PowerShell-based cmdlets (your mileage will vary). All good stuff.

From a technology perspective, Microsoft’s announcement of Viva, their new employee experience platform (EXP) for Microsoft 365, contained a mixture of the good, not-so-good, and puzzling. I don’t plan to cover Microsoft positioning and launch messaging (see Brad’s article). Instead, I want to probe at the technology. To start, Viva is a great example of…

New Technologies at the Center of Outlook’s Future Outlook fans would be forgiven for thinking that all the oxygen in the Microsoft 365 collaboration ecosystem is being sucked out by Teams). But then a series of videos created for the virtual Ignite 2020 conference revealed that there’s life in this venerable product yet (given a…

Microsoft dodged the opportunity to fire a bullet into their own foot when they pulled back plans to launch “workspaces” in Exchange Online. Announced on Monday and withdrawn on Tuesday, Workspaces are a new form of room mailboxes, the difference being that room mailboxes are used to reserve traditional conference rooms while workspaces seem to…

In a surprise development, Microsoft has released the source code for the Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) on GitHub. Fans of the non-SQL database engine, which has powered every version of Exchange since the initial 4.0 release twenty-five years ago, now have the chance to peruse the ESE code. Although Microsoft isn’t accepting suggestions to improve…

Activity Explorer Highlights Label Activities In June 2020, I covered Microsoft’s “Know Your Data” initiative, essentially the introduction of a bunch of new features in the Data classification section of the Microsoft 365 compliance center. Requiring Office 365 E5 or Microsoft 365 E5 (or E5 compliance) licenses, Microsoft targets this functionality at large enterprises who…

Delve: Exposing Permission Weaknesses Since 2015 Since its introduction in 2015, people have complained that Delve exposed documents to other users that they’d prefer not to share. In fact, the problem lies with poor permissions practice rather than Delve because Delve only ever shows information to a user which they are entitled to see. In…

When I wrote about Azure AD Access Reviews for Office 365 Groups (now Microsoft 365 Groups) in November 2017, I concluded that “any tenant that wants to use access reviews to control external access to Office 365 Groups or Microsoft Teams faces the challenge of having to create individual access reviews for each group that…

Surprising Play from Microsoft Microsoft has published an add-on to allow Google Calendar users to create and use Microsoft Teams meetings in the Google Workspace Marketplace. From the age of the comments, it seems like the add-on has been available since late November. However, Microsoft isn’t saying too much about the topic and the only…

Big Files and Differential Sync Some excitement was generated, at least inside Microsoft, for the January 12 announcement that SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business now support uploads of files sized up to 250 GB. This is an increase from the previous 100 GB maximum announced in July 2020. The new capability is designed to…