Author Archives: Tony Redmond

The PowerShell Mess in the Microsoft Cloud

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Office 365 with Teams
Office 365 with Teams

PowerShell is a great way of automating common administrative Office 365 operations. That is, if you know what module to use and how to use the cmdlets in that module. Unfortunately things are a bit of a mess with too many modules and inconsistent behavior in areas like error handling. With so many development groups working on Office 365, the PowerShell situation might be inevitable, but it needs cleaning up.

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MyAnalytics Focused on Outcomes not Raw Statistics

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The new MyAnalytics dashboard
The new MyAnalytics dashboard

The new version of MyAnalytics is available to Office 365 E3 and E5 users and takes a different approach to the interpretation of data gathered about user work activities inside different apps. Instead of telling you the raw counts of messages sent and read and other data, MyAnalytics gives insights to help people work smarter and achieve a better work-life balance.

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Finding the Identifier for Azure or Office 365 Tenants

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Finding an Office 365 Tenant Identifier
Finding an Office 365 Tenant Identifier

After seeing a tweet about a site that could return the tenant identifier for any Azure or Office 365 tenant, I was a tad suspicious. After all, this data should be private – or so you’d think. In fact, the WhatIsMyTenantId.com site simply takes records available to enable OAuth 2.0 sign-ins and extracts the tenant identifier from their content. It’s an easy way to get hold of tenant identifiers.

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Yammer Supports EU Data Residency with No External Collaboration

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Viewing the Yammer network location
Viewing the Yammer network location

Microsoft says that new Yammer networks can have their messages stored in the European Union instead of the U.S. That sounds good, until you understand the downside that Yammer loses a lot of its external collaboration capabilities. Given this, it’s likely that some existing EU-based Office 365 tenants who use Yammer will be happy to have their messages stay in the U.S.

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Renaming Teams and Channels Can Be Messy, Especially with SharePoint

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You can easily rename a team by giving it a new display name, or do the same thing to a channel. But Teams and SharePoint Online have the kind of relationship that’s based on tight connections, so renaming team or channel names leaves SharePoint untouched. Site URLs remain unchanged and if you try and fix up the folder names for channels, you can end up with a real mess.

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Phishing Report Highlights Need for Sophisticated Anti-Malware Software

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A recent report by a security vendor says that 25% of phishing messages get by Exchange Online Protection (EOP) and arrive into Office 365 user mailboxes. This highlights the need to configure EOP properly and run multiple lines of defense. Microsoft would like you to use Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) alongside EOP. Offerings from other security vendors are also available. For better protection against phishing, you should consider something like ATP.

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Exchange’s EHLO Blog Moves to The Microsoft Technical Community

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Microsoft has moved the venerable EHLO blog maintained by the Exchange product group to the Microsoft Technical Community (MTC) platform. The first post is about the Exchange 2019 sizing calculator. Hopefully the changeover won’t affect the great content published in EHLO over the years. What’s of more concern is the lack of participation in the MTC by Microsoft product engineers and MVPs.

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Important Office 365 Announcements from the SharePoint Conference

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SharePoint File Storage Powering Office 365
SharePoint File Storage Powering Office 365

Microsoft made a ton of announcements at this week’s SharePoint conference in Las Vegas. If you’re an Office 365 tenant administrator, the health of SharePoint Online and what it and OneDrive for Business can do is important to you. Among all the fluffy stuff about intelligent intranets, there was some good news about improvements in administration, security, and network utilization, all of which will help other Office 365 apps too.

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Bringing Microsoft Search by Bing to Office 365

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Microsoft Search reveals all about a person
Microsoft Search reveals all about a person

You can now connect Office 365 sources like SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Teams, and Yammer to Microsoft Search and have Bing reveal results from those sources in its searches. It’s a useful trick, as long as you use Bing as your search engine. And there’s the small matter that Microsoft has left Exchange out of the list of connected sources, which seems to reduce the usefulness of searches a tad.

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Microsoft Enables Longer Azure Active Directory Passwords

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A user resets their password
A user resets their password

You can now protect your Azure Active Directory account with a 256-character password, including spaces. This news will bring much joy to Office 365 administrators and others who hated the previous 16-character limit, but please don’t rush into forcing users to change their passwords without taking the time to pause and consider how best to proceed. Longer passwords are good, but they should be only one part of a strategy to protect user accounts.

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