Office 365

Microsoft is playing hardball and will offer corporate customers free ‘One Drive’ services if they are currently contracted with another vendor.

Microsoft has released some useful updates for the Office 365 Planner app, but external access is still not there, which is baffling. On the other hand, you now have an OWA-like schedule view, filters to suppress tasks that you don’t want to see, and better notifications to tell you when you must do some work. And an iCalendar feed is coming soon to allow you to clutter up your Outlook calendar with even more stuff.

Teams is the poster child for Office 365 right now, so it’s only right that Microsoft has refreshed the Teams UI a year into the app’s life. The changes look pretty good and are useful, even if the Who Bot might not be able to unpick the complexities of the organization you work for.

The Meltdown vulnerability is clearly serious, especially if you run on-premises servers. But if you use Office 365, should you be worried? Well, maybe, but when you sign up for a cloud service, you transfer responsibility for understanding and responding to threat to the service provider. Over to Microsoft…

We can use PowerShell for SPO by using any of the development environments provided by Microsoft. If you ask my recommendation about what tool to use, I would say Windows PowerShell ISE or Visual Studio Code. Finally, there are also third-party tools to run PowerShell scripts and modules for SPO.

You know that Office 365 Groups have a mailbox and that the mailbox holds conversations and the group calendar. But many other folders exist in a group mailbox. Some are used for internal purposes, some by clients. And sometimes you want to look to see what those folders hold, as when some mail might have been misdirected to Junk Email.

Microsoft says that Office 365 will support internationalized email addresses (EAI) in Q1 2018. Support is limited to inbound and outbound email and you will not be able to assign email addresses with non-Latin characters to Office 365 accounts until all the heavy lifting is done to make sure that nothing breaks, including in hybrid organizations.

The Teams PowerShell module is flawed, but that does not mean that you cannot do work with it. Here’s a primer of the most important cmdlets, together with a link to a rather interesting approach to finding out what Office 365 Groups are team-enabled.

Microsoft Teams is the hot property in Office 365 right now, but sometimes its user interface shows signs of immaturity. For example, when you got back to work after the holidays, you might have seen a ton of new activity to deal with. Email clients have rules, views, and automated assistants to help with the load, but with Teams you have to sort it all out yourself.

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