Exchange Online

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…

Refreshing the Substrate Last year, I wrote about the Office 365 substrate, a little understood but critical component of how Microsoft is developing their cloud services. That article followed a talk by Microsoft Fellow Jeffrey Snover at the Ignite 2019 conference. Now boasting the title of CTO for Modern Workforce Transformation, Snover recently explored the…

Brain Fails to Understand Microsoft I know I must be missing something in Microsoft’s cunning plan to make priority accounts available in Microsoft 365. It must be a basic point that I have overlooked, some simple need that has remained unanswered since the introduction of Office 365 in June 2011. But I can’t make head…

Helping Investigators Understand What Happened In March, Microsoft eventually released the MailItemsAccessed “crucial audit event” for accounts holding Office 365 E5 licenses (other suitable licenses include Microsoft 365 E5 or the Microsoft 365 E5 compliance). Crucial events are deemed to be of higher value to investigators or others who need to understand exactly what happened…

Last On-Premises Version? Last March, a Microsoft employee caused a stir with an assertion that Exchange 2019 will be the last on-premises version of Microsoft’s enterprise email server. At the time, my assessment was “I don’t expect Microsoft to ship on-premises versions of Exchange or SharePoint in the way they’ve done in the past because…

Smart Technology Figures Out What You Want to Type On May 8, Microsoft announced plans (MC212345) to introduce a feature called “suggested text” to OWA. Microsoft 365 roadmap item 63795 says “Using smart technology, Outlook will predict text while you type. Just use the Tab key to accept the text prediction.” Text predictions is another…

Put October 13 In Your Diary Time passes and products age, except in the cloud where renewal is an ongoing process. For Exchange Server 2016, Microsoft is keen for you to know that it reaches the end of mainstream support on October 13, 2020. Extended support for Exchange 2016 ceases on October 14, 2025. Exiting…

The Office 365 Substrate uses Exchange Online mailboxes to store a lot of data that users never see. The data is used by the substrate for different purposes, mostly to make it easier for features to get to relevant information. Microsoft doesn’t document exactly what is stored, where it is stored, and how it is used, so we must poke around in the innards of mailboxes to see what we can discover.

PowerShell Critical for Office 365 Although the Microsoft Graph is gaining popularity as the method for automating administrative processes for Office 365 workloads, there’s no doubt that PowerShell remains the most common automation tool. The two approaches can be mixed to create solutions when neither is quite good enough and Microsoft is still working on…

Old Exchange Online Admin Center Due for Replacement You might have noticed that the Exchange Online Admin Center (EAC) is showing its age. Compared to the other workload admin centers in Office 365, EAC is positively creaking at the seams, much like myself. At the Ignite 2019 conference, Microsoft said that they are working on…