Office

Microsoft has simplified the synchronization architecture used to connect Outlook mobile clients to Exchange. The new approach sets the scene for some new functionality, like support for S/MIME and access to shared mailboxes. It’s all good and it marks the continued progress of Outlook mobile since the Acompli acquisition in 2014.

It was another busy month for Office 365, here’s the highlights from the previous month.

Given the increased ways to apply rights management protection (encryption) to Exchange Online messages, the volume of encrypted traffic should rise. That’s good for users because their email is protected, but it’s not so good for ISVs who must deal with encrypted email. One such example is autosignature products, where server-based components can’t touch protected email to add their text.

Sensitivity labels allow Office 365 tenants to encrypt messages and documents very easily. That is, as long as you have applications that understand labels. A preview version of the AIP client integrates a Sensitivity button in the Office desktop applications, but we must wait for native integration across desktop, web, and mobile clients.

The new sensitivity labels available in Office 365 bring marking and protection functionality for Exchange and SharePoint that was previously only available with Azure Information Protection. In this article, we consider how to migrate AIP labels to Office 365 so that users can encrypt their way to happiness.

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.

After acquiring the app, Microsoft rebranded it to Outlook and the rest is history; the email app remains one of the top downloaded applications for iOS and Android. But the founder, Javier Soltero, is departing Microsoft.

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.