Tony Redmond

Last October, I wrote about One Outlook, Microsoft’s vision for the future of its family of email clients. The basis of the story was a collection of three technologies deemed critical for the long-term development of Outlook: OWA Powered Experiences (OPX), Microsoft synchronization technology, and the augmentation loop. Mary-Jo Foley’s recent story about the Monarch…

Last November, Microsoft experienced a great deal of criticism from privacy campaigners following the introduction of the Productivity Score feature. The resulting hubbub evolved into a PR issue which caused Microsoft to abandon display of individual user details, even if the data is easily available and widely used elsewhere inside Microsoft 365. In a nutshell,…

Removing Puzzlement Last month I reported my puzzlement about Microsoft’s announcement of priority accounts. I couldn’t figure out what value these accounts brought to the table, especially as they were targeted solely at tenants with more than 10,000 accounts with more than 50 active Exchange Online users. My report was based on details in a…

Time to Make Final Checks It’s natural to take time off during the holiday season to forget about the woes of IT operations. One of the nice things about using a service like Office 365 is that other people take care of running it while you’re away. On the downside, decisions made by the people…

Microsoft released a report in late October to demonstrate how well Microsoft 365 meets the compliance needs of the financial sector subject to U.S. regulations. The level of inaccuracy in the text meant that I didn’t think much of the report. In any case, the report placed great emphasis on two developments. The first was…

On December 15, Microsoft announced the preview of Yammer support for guest user access through Azure B2B Collaboration. Yammer joins Microsoft 365 Groups, Teams, SharePoint Online, and Planner as the mainline Microsoft 365 applications supporting guest access. Yammer’s External Collaboration Journey Guest access first appeared in Office 365 Groups in September 2016. At the time,…

Photos Enhance the Tenant Directory In the past I have written about the desirability of assigning photos to guest users and how to use PowerShell to assign a default photo to guest users. Nice as it is to have photos for guest users, it’s even more important to have photos for tenant user accounts, especially…

Great to Protect Content Until Access is Needed The growing popularity of sensitivity labels is goodness if you simply look at the desirability of protecting confidential information. However, the presence of a larger percentage of encrypted data within Office 365 creates some addition management challenges. As I have noted during several conference talks, the only…

Microsoft Graph and Audit Log Too Important to Lose Thinking about the fuss and bother which erupted over Microsoft Productivity Score, I concluded that the people concerned about management oversight of user activity within Microsoft 365 had very little knowledge about the topic. They looked at the pretty graphs and tables of user data and…

Following Personal Support in Teams Mobile Clients On November 19, just before things started to wind down for the Thanksgiving holidays, Microsoft announced the preview of “personal” features in the Teams desktop and browser clients. Preview availability for personal features on desktop (Windows only) and browsers follows up the debut of Teams at home for…