Office 365

Exchange Online Protection now highlights unauthenticated users – or messages that come from people who cannot prove their identity. Instead of a nice picture (or avatar), you see a question mark for the user. Maybe this might make people think twice about the opportunity to send money to someone to liberate funds held in a bank. Just maybe.

A year ago, Microsoft said RPC over HTTP was dead from Oct 31, 2017 and that Outlook clients must use MAPI over HTTP to connect to Exchange Online. The protocol is still dead, but it will persist in a zombie-like unsupported mode. The question is for how long?

Office 365 has given its rights management capabilities a complete refresh. Clients deal with protected email better and it’s easy to send protected email to people inside and outside your organization, including coverage of consumer email systems like Gmail and Outlook.com. And protected email works on mobile devices too.

In today’s Ask the Admin, Russell Smith explains the different licensing options for G Suite and how they compare to Office 365 plans.

Microsoft says they will communicate large changes in Office 365 better, but what about all the small changes that show up without warning? Teams is a serial offender, perhaps because it’s the new kid on the block and is rushing to replace Skype for Business Online. In any case, it would be nice if we heard about small changes before we found them.

OWA now boasts a useful mailbox option, which is helpful if you feel that you need to remove some old and lingering email. The funny thing is that Microsoft doesn’t seem to have told anyone about the feature – or my search-karma is failing me in finding any information about it.

Based on user feedback and a horrible year of change management missteps, Microsoft is changing the way it handles major updates for Office 365. The plan seems like it might work and let’s hope that it does. No one wants to experience the same kind of update surprises we have seen in 2017.

Office 365 continues to grow strongly but all the added users (and tenants) do not seem to have impacted the reliability of the service, at least not measured by performance against the guaranteed 99.9% SLA for availability. Incidents do steal minutes away from users, but not enough to make a difference.

Adding a secondary administrator to OneDrive For Business in Office 365 is a very common ask for an Office 365 Administrator. Fortunately, this task can be achieved in at least 4 different ways as this article describes.

Microsoft clarified what AAD features need premium licenses at Ignite. Tenants need many of those features to control Office 365 Groups and Teams, and some of the listed features are surprising. Did you know that the group creation policy is a premium feature? Or adding a default classification. The chosen set of features seems odd, but at least Microsoft is now clear about what you must license.