Exchange Online

Microsoft has updated the vererable Get-MailboxStatistics cmdlet in Exchange Online PowerShell to return a bunch of new mailbox activity properties. The properties cover different activities like email and calendar, but the problem with the LastLogon property remains and you still need to do some extra work to get accurate last login information for a user.

Some people worry that Exchange Online mailboxes could be compromised by ransomeware and people will be forced to pay BitCoin to decrypt their messages. It’s certainly a possibility, but out-of-the-box solutions exist if you’re unlucky enough to be infected. That is, if you’ve done the necessary up-front planning to prepare for the worst to happen.,

Microsoft has started to flag its intention to deprecate the Search-Mailbox cmdlet. It’s probably the right time to remove this cmdlet from Exchange Online because Office 365 compliance searches can serve the same purpose. At least, compliance searches can do most of what Search-Mailbox does faster. Some functionality gaps need to be filled before we can bid adieu to Search-Mailbox, but its time is coming.

Office 365 Information Barriers allow organizations to erect logical firewalls between different user communities to ensure that regulatory and legal requirements are met. Teams and Exchange Online support Information Barrier policies, which replace Address Book Policies. Some work is necessary to get Information Barriers set up. We cover that work in this article and prepare the ground for deploying the policies to Teams.

Office 365 Message Encryption (OME) now offers an advanced set of features to Office 365 E5 tenants. You can have messages with specific branding delivered to different domains. Advanced OME also includes message revocation. Branding is a feature that will appeal to a limited set of tenants, but it would be nice if revocation was available to a wider set of Office 365 tenants.

PowerShell is a great way of automating common administrative Office 365 operations. That is, if you know what module to use and how to use the cmdlets in that module. Unfortunately things are a bit of a mess with too many modules and inconsistent behavior in areas like error handling. With so many development groups working on Office 365, the PowerShell situation might be inevitable, but it needs cleaning up.

The new version of MyAnalytics is available to Office 365 E3 and E5 users and takes a different approach to the interpretation of data gathered about user work activities inside different apps. Instead of telling you the raw counts of messages sent and read and other data, MyAnalytics gives insights to help people work smarter and achieve a better work-life balance.

The PST is now a very old file format. Originally introduced to give users the ability to store email moved from their Exchange mailbox, the need for PSTs disappeared years ago because Office 365 users have massive mailboxes. Despite this, some organizations persist in allowing people to use PSTs.

The Azure Information Protection team recently published an interesting post about making a “cloud exit.” In other words, how to move your encrypted data out of a cloud service like Office 365. As it turns out, this is feasible if you plan. But how many organizations have even thought about how they might decrypt protected content?

Office 365 retention policies help organizations keep information for as long as needed. But retention consumes storage. This isn’t a problem for Exchange Online, but it is for SharePoint Online, because files held in the Preservation Hold Library are charged against the tenant storage quota. This isn’t a reason to not use retention policies, but you should be careful.