Office

It’s a good idea to understand whether any external people have access to documents in your Office 365 tenant. There’s no option on the Office 365 or SharePoint Online consoles to tell you what access external users enjoy to SharePoint sites, so we must use some PowerShell to interrogate SharePoint and see what that reveals.

Microsoft says that SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business offer secure collaboration within Office 365. Good auditing is part of the reason why, but because SharePoint is so chatty when it comes to generating audit records, you might need some help to filter what’s in the audit log to see what’s really important.

GDPR Article 17 allows individuals to request an organization to erase their personal data. Now that GDPR is in effect, what are the practical steps to take to process an erasure request against Office 365 data? As it turns out, the answer is not straightforward.

Planner now supports guest user access to its plans. Office 365 tenants will celebrate this feature because they’ve been waiting for it to arrive. It’s curious that it has taken Microsoft so long to upgrade Planner for this feature given that Groups and Teams have had this capability for a while. But it’s here now, so enjoy.

Outlook.com (premium) now boasts two new protected email features taken directly from Exchange Online. It’s an example of how the shared Office 365 infrastructure enables Microsoft to make functionality available to users of its consumer and enterprise platforms as they want. OneDrive Restore is another example. In both cases, the features aren’t available to free seats.

Many Office 365 tenants use Planner for group-based task management. Generally, the application is OK and has been getting better. Now it can connect to Outlook to synchronize tasks into a user calendar, which then allows users to see tasks alongside their other commitments and print details off if needed. It’s an imperfect but acceptable solution to the lack of print capabilities within Planner.

Microsoft Teams now shows team owners when their team is going to expire – that if, if you use the Office 365 Groups expiration policy. But tenant administrators don’t have a report showing them when groups expire, so we wrote one in PowerShell for you to use (and improve).

GDPR comes into force on May 25, 2018. To help Office 365 tenant administrators respond to GDPR data subject requests, a new DSR case feature is available as a preview in the Security and Compliance Center. The feature is based on the existing eDiscovery case and content search functionality, so it should be very familiar to anyone who has searched Office 365 for email, documents, and other information.

Microsoft has boosted the per-user storage allocation for SharePoint Online by 20x to make it easier for people to move data to Office 365. It’s a good move, and one that’s probably overdue. Teams and Office 365 Groups have accelerated the use of SharePoint over the last year or so. However, Exchange also increased its storage allocation and that hasn’t got everyone to the cloud. Yet.

Anyone running an Office 365 tenant knows that it’s hard to keep up with everything that changes. Imagine what it must be like to write about Office 365! To clear my list of things that I want to mention but haven’t had the chance to, here’s some short snippets that you might or might not have heard about.