Teams Gets Closer to Email

Teams Splash
Teams Splash

Since its inception, Microsoft Teams has had an odd relationship with email. Some think that Teams will replace email, at least for many internal conversations. The real facts are that Teams and email need to survive and co-operate together as collaborative modalities for Office 365 tenants. Microsoft is introducing three new features to help Teams gets along better with email, and that’s a good thing.

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Microsoft Working on Outlook Cloud Signatures

OWA splash screen
OWA splash screen

The news that Microsoft is working on cloud signatures for Outlook for Windows is welcome. The venerable Outlook client has long stored its signature information in the system registry, which makes it hard to move signatures from PC to PC. On the other hand, OWA stores its signatures in mailboxes, so the same signature is used no matter where you log in. Of course, OWA is a simpler client (no profiles, for instance), but it should be eminently possible to store everything Outlook needs in the cloud. At least for Outlook clients connected to Exchange Online…

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Microsoft Retreats from Flawed Plan to Force Bing Extension on Chrome Users

Office 365 with Teams
Office 365 with Teams

After several weeks of customer protest, Microsoft decided that their plan to automatically install a Microsoft Search in Bing extension for Chrome browsers with Office ProPlus wouldn’t fly. While it’s good that Microsoft is tweaking their plans and will allow Office 365 tenants to opt-in, the way they went about announcing such an outrageous decision begs the question just how Microsoft thought this was ever a good idea.

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Teams Certificate Outage Causes Office 365 Tenants Concern

Downdetecter tracks the Teams outage on February 3
Downdetecter tracks the Teams outage on February 3

The fact that the Teams outage on 3 February was caused by an expired authentication certificate is enough to cause Office 365 tenants to ask why such a thing happened. Teams is built on top of a lot of Office 365 and Azure components, so it’s not altogether surprising that issues happen in what is a very complex infrastructure spread around the world. But given Microsoft’s hyped focus on DevOps, you would have thought that something as fundamental as an expired certificate would have been picked up and fixed before it caused customer disruption.

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Microsoft Releases Sensitive by Default Upload for SharePoint Online

Access blocked to a SharePoint file because DLP processing is not yet done
Access blocked to a SharePoint file because DLP processing is not yet done

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…

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Microsoft Launches Preview PowerShell Module for Graph

Microsoft Graph PowerShell module
Microsoft Graph PowerShell module

Microsoft has made a preview PowerShell module for the Graph available for developers to play with. Being able to use PowerShell with the Graph exposes a lot of data to play with, so it’s a great addition to the administrator toolkit. To see how things worked in practice,, I convert a script to report Teams channels that are email-enabled to use the Graph module. Things worked out pretty well, but as you’d expect, some rough edges exist that need to be smoothed.

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Microsoft Closes Outlook Copy-On-Write Flaw with Exchange Online Fix


Microsoft fixed the copy-on-write bug in Outlook for Windows in Exchange Online. The fix stops users removing attachments from sent or received messages. A strong case can be made that the fix should have been present from the start to stop any possibility that clients could comprise Exchange Native Data Protection. Microsoft doesn’t think many people were affected and they could be right, but that doesn’t make the problem any easier to swallow.

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Managing OneDrive for Business File Upload Requests

Some not-so-desirable file types uploaded to OneDrive for Business
Some not-so-desirable file types uploaded to OneDrive for Business

The new Request Files feature in OneDrive for Business is great for users but comes with no admin controls. You can block the feature completely with a kludge and use Office 365 audit records to know when people are requesting files. However, Microsoft could make the feature so much better by extending some existing controls to make requesting files work better and more securely.

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Microsoft Tries to Boost Microsoft Search in Bing with Chrome Extension

Microsoft Search in Bing shows Office 365 results
Microsoft Search in Bing shows Office 365 results

In a January 22 post, Microsoft announced a plan to boost Microsoft Search in Bing by including an extension to make Bing the search engine for Chrome for Office ProPlus users. Obviously no one outside Redmond thinks that this is a good idea as forcing users to embrace Bing is unlikely to be popular. But it might happen in mid-February when the next Monthly Channel update for Office ProPlus lands. Stay tuned for developments.

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OneDrive for Business Makes It Easy to Request Files

Selecting files to upload to OneDrive for Business
Selecting files to upload to OneDrive for Business

The OneDrive for Business Request Files feature is a quick and simple way for users to ask others to upload files to a target folder using a special sharing link. Request files is now available within Office 365. The process is straightforward and might even help to stop people sending some attachments around in email.

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