Office 365

Office 365 Groups are the reason why many SharePoint Online sites appear in tenants. If you’re on the Pacific coast of the U.S., the regional settings are OK. But anyone else in the rest of the world who uses the SharePoint browser interface will see times and dates in that instead of the local format. You can change the regional settings for a site, and now you can make sure that new sites have the right settings.

Microsoft Flow integration in SharePoint Online provides a very simple way to model common collaboration scenarios, such as send an OnDemand notification when a specific document has been uploaded to a document library or a list item has been created in a list. In this article I will show you how to create a simple Flow to send an OnDemand notification when a document is selected in a document library.

With GDPR coming, it’s good news that Teams now supports Office 365 retention policies. You can apply retention to messages posted to channels and chats, or use a mixture of policies to target different sets of users and teams. You might be surprised how Teams has implemented retention – and remember, we’re only talking about messages – other content might also need a policy.

Even though Microsoft has your data, that doesn’t mean you are protected from an outage…here’s what you need to consider with Office 365 and your data.

Office 365 has a new admin center for Teams and Skype for Business Online. It’s still early days for the TSBAC, as I like to call it, but you can see where Microsoft is going as it unifies the disparate parts of Teams and Skype for Business Online into one uber-admin center to beat them all.

Microsoft is bringing many of its corporate data protection services to Office 365 Home and Personal.

It is nice to have an Azure Active Directory Expiration Policy for Office 365 Groups, but it’s not so good that the policy functions exclusively based on age. Another problem is that administrators have no way of knowing when groups will expire. So we take out PowerShell, write a script, and hey presto, we have a report. We still need to solve the problem of creating a policy that functions based on activity rather than age, but that’s another day’s work.

PowerShell is a critical skill for Office 365 tenant administrators. A knowledge of PowerShell allows you to fix things that Microsoft leaves undone in apps like Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Teams. Sure, black holes exist for PowerShell (like Planner) and it is slow to process thousands of objects, but there’s nothing like a little script for getting things done.

The Office Customization Tool for Click-To-Run is a web-based Tool created by Microsoft to simplify the generation of configuration files required to centrally deploy custom Office installations in any kind of organization. The tool, currently in preview, is very simple to use and it allows us to create such configuration files in minutes.

Companies that move to Office 365 have to decide what mobile email client to use. A native client that uses Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) or Outlook? In the past, the best choice was probably something like the iOS mail app. Now, Outlook is the focus of Microsoft’s mobile efforts and it’s where all the new functionality appears. EAS is still valuable, just less so than it was before.