Author Archives: Tony Redmond

Key Office 365 News from the Microsoft Ignite Conference 2019

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Microsoft made a ton of Office 365-related announcements at their Ignite conference in Orlando. Here’s a summary of the key news for SharePoint, Exchange, Stream, Teams, Yammer, and Outlook. More information will emerge during the week, so stay tuned for more coverage as news emerges.

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The Big Side Effect on Teams of Renaming a SharePoint Site URL

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SharePoint Online now boasts the ability to rename site URLs, which seems good, but not so good when you discover that the new URL breaks the connection with Teams. The fact that this happens is revealed in Microsoft documentation and it’s been a problem since the beta testing of the site rename function. Microsoft seems curiously disinterested in fixing the problem as quickly as they should have. A case of attention distracted elsewhere?

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FindTime – An Underappreciated Gem in the Office 365 World

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Microsoft’s FindTime service helps Office 365 users find the right time to schedule a meeting with people inside and outside their tenant. It’s an underappreciated gem. And the good news is that an even better service called Calendar.Help is on the way. Well, it’s better if you like asking Cortana to find the right meeting dates for you rather than the more-hands on approach taken by FindTime. Whichever way you cut it, help is always appreciated when setting up meetings, so it’s nice that these tools are available.

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Microsoft to Office 365 Users: Have Your Credit Cards Ready

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Office 365 with Teams
Office 365 with Teams

In a rather odd decision, Microsoft is launching self-service purchases for Office 365 tenant users who want to use the Power Platform without consulting an administrator. Another troubling sign is the way that the MailItemsAccessed audit event has been packaged into a new Microsoft 365 Audit feature. Tenants expected to see this audit event last January after Microsoft announced it was coming. Its subsequent disappearance was a mystery until now.

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G Suite Gets an Executive Reboot to Revamp Office 365 Foe

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Office 365 with Teams
Office 365 with Teams

Javier Soltero, ex-boss of Outlook, is now running G Suite for Google. The appointment is an opportunity to reboot G Suite to take on Office 365 and make up some of the ground that’s been lost in the last five years using the “new brush sweeps clean” principle. In other news, Microsoft bought Mover to acquire its migration connectors that move files into SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, including files from Google Drive.

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Discover Who Creates Guest Accounts in Office 365 Applications

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Office 365 applications now create many guest accounts in Azure Active Directory. You can see what accounts exist, but it’s more difficult to discover who created the accounts – or why they were created. Fortunately, the Office 365 audit log holds a lot of useful data that can be interrogated to find some answers and PowerShell is a great tool for slicing and dicing audit data. See what you think of the answers I’ve come up with.

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SharePoint Gets Better Connected to Teams

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The fit-and-finish quality within Office 365 is sometimes less than desirable. Two recent changes in SharePoint Online make it easier for users to know when a document library is connected to Teams and to generate thumbnails for items stored in the library. Neither change is awe-inspiring, but both are examples of how to improve SharePoint’s fit-and-finish, which is a good thing.

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Highlighting Some Office 365 Sessions at Microsoft Ignite 2019

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Microsoft Ignite 2019 is in four weeks, so now’s a good time to start browsing the session catalog to find interesting sessions to attend in person or listen to afterwards. I’ve been through the catalog to find some sessions and present my list here. Feel free to disagree and find other sessions in the > 1,400 listed already.

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No Surprise That Exchange Online Uses Windows Server Core

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A recent Microsoft post contained the news that Exchange Online uses Windows Server Core. That might be news to some, but not to anyone who’s been following the advice of the Exchange product group. Exchange Online doesn’t use virtual servers, follows a preferred architecture, wants to reduce the potential attack surface, and extract as much CPU as possible out of its servers. All good reasons why Windows Server Core helps.

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Change in Management Philosophy Needed to Accelerate Teams Growth

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Microsoft Teams is very successful at present, but a nagging doubt exists that some of the approaches taken by Microsoft towards Teams management and administration are less than optimum. It’s great to introduce a mass of new features on an ongoing basis and it’s better when policies exist to control the use of the features. But do new features always need to be enabled out-of-the-box?

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