SharePoint Online

Microsoft has imposed further restrictions on some Office 365 services to release CPU cycles and other resources to allow end users to work. The major impact is felt by SharePoint Online, OneNote, and Stream, and consequently by Teams because it uses all of the above. We can expect restrictions to last until Microsoft manages to deploy additional resources in its Office 365 datacenters.

Office 365 Sensitivity Labels can now be applied to “containers” – Teams, Office 365 Groups, and SharePoint sites. Sensitivity labels replace the old text-only classifications that have been available since 2016. The labels don’t affect the contents of the containers, but they can control some container settings, like whether a team allows guest access or if it’s open to any tenant user to join. It’s yet another development in the label and protection story for Office 365.

SharePoint Online is embracing Office 365 Sensitivity Labels to allow protected documents to be processed by indexing and available to content searches. The Office Online apps (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) also support the application of sensitivity labels. The only disappointment is that the SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business browser interfaces don’t allow labels to be applied to documents.

Microsoft has made a preview of the Fluid Foundation available for Office 365 users to try out. The preview demonstrates how components can work together to share information quickly. It is very focused on SharePoint Online at present, but Microsoft plans to make intelligent fluid components available in Teams, OWA, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Office apps. The preview raises some questions, but that’s the nature of the beast.

SharePoint Online document libraries keep 500 versions of files by default. The minimum recommended by Microsoft is 100. But why are so many versions kept? The reason is that it leads to better recoverability and underpins features like AutoSave and co-authoring. You might be tempted to reduce the number of versions, but why? I can’t come up with a good answer.

A new SharePoint Online feature blocks access to newly uploaded files until Office 365 Data Loss Prevention processes the files to detect policy violations due to the presence of sensitive data. DLP processing for SharePoint Online can take several hours to reach new files, so enabling sensitive by default stops users inadvertently sharing sensitive content until DLP can process files. The downside is that you can’t apply sensitive by default to individual sites. It’s all or nothing…

Microsoft released several updates for Office 365 this month and if you missed any of the new, we have you covered.

Office 365 has experienced great success since its launch in June 2011, but it’s also had its share of failures as well. This article considers the most important technical advances in Office 365 and the most important parts of the ecosystem as well as some places where things didn’t go quite so well as either Microsoft or tenants would have liked.

The Brave Browser offers the prospect of speed and security. But how well does it work with the Office 365 browser apps? As it happens, pretty well, with some exceptions. Here’s what I discovered when I test-drove Brave with OWA, Teams, SharePoint Online, Yammer, Planner, and Stream.

Designers working with Microsoft Forms can now include a file upload question type in their questionnaires, surveys, and other forms. It’s a small but valuable change to Forms. Depending on the form type, the uploaded files are stored in OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online.