Author Archives: Tony Redmond

Analyzing the 2019 Numbers for Different Office 365 Workloads

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Office 365 with Teams
Office 365 with Teams

Microsoft is notoriously careful at giving out usage numbers for different Office 365 workloads.We know what the overall count is and now we have numbers for SharePoint Online and Teams. Some glances into a handy crystal ball and some inspired guesswork allows us to calculate likely numbers for Exchange Online, Yammer, and Planner and paint a more comprehensive picture of what’s happening inside Office 365.

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OneDrive for Business Delivers Sharing Consistency Across Office 365

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Linking to a PowerPoint slide
Linking to a PowerPoint slide

OneDrive for Business is responsible for how sharing works within Office 365. Big strides are being made to achieving consistency across all the Office 365 apps and new some tricks are coming along too, like being able to link to a PowerPoint slide, requesting people to upload files to a folder, or using the URL in a browser as a link. All good stuff.

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Exploring the Office 365 Substrate

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The Office 365 Operating System
The Office 365 Operating System

The Office 365 Substrate is a poorly understood part of Microsoft’s Cloud Office system. The substrate is a critical part of enabling services that run across different applications like Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Teams, and so on. Functionality like search, information protection, data governance, and eDiscovery is a lot harder when you have multiple moving parts. The substrate gives cohesion and coherence to what could otherwise be a tangled mess.

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Teams Doesn’t Need Two PowerShell Modules (But Why Two Exist)

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If you work with Teams through PowerShell, you’ll know that you sometimes need to open the Skype for Business Online module. It’s a royal pain in the rear end to deal with two inconsistent modules. It would be much neater if everything was gathered into one coherent module. However, that’s not going to happen much before Skype for Business Online retires in 2021. In the interim, here are seven sets of policy cmdlets that you’ll probably need to use to assign policies to multiple users at one time.

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Tracking Anonymous Access to SharePoint and OneDrive Documents

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Cloudy attachments are an excellent way of sharing documents through email without attaching files. Behind the scenes, an anonymous link to the document is sent to recipients, who can then use the link to open, edit, or download the document (depending on the assigned permission). Office 365 tenant administrators don’t have great visibility into what kind of anonymous sharing happens, but they can with a little bit of PowerShell and the contents of the Office 365 audit log.

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Year of Yammer: New Goals for Microsoft’s Enterprise Collaboration App

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Microsoft has declared some undefined period, perhaps starting at the Ignite conference, to be the “Year of Yammer.” Cynics might say “What! Yet again?” as Microsoft tries to position its enterprise networking app within Office 365 collaboration as it certainly feels like we have been down this path before. On the upside, this attempt seems to focus on what Yammer is good at instead of mimicking other apps. Time will tell.

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Can Exchange Online Really Recall Messages?

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Outlook users are more than aware of the problems involved in message recall, a feature that’s only available in Outlook desktop and has a nasty habit of not working. The reasons why the feature fails are well known, but soon might be addressed by a new Exchange Online implementation that promises to work for all clients and across Office 365. Time will tell if careers and love can be rescued by the new message recall.

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Managing Teams Private Channels

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A private channel in the teams list
A private channel in the teams list

Everyone got very excited when Microsoft introduced private channels for Teams. Which is nice. The hard work of understanding the technology and managing its introduction now begins, so in this article we look at how to control the creation of private channels and what to do once private channels are out there in use. Some planning is always good, and mastering private channels will take preparation. Let’s begin!

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Exchange Online PowerShell Goes RESTful – But Only for Some Cmdlets

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At Microsoft Ignite 2019, the Exchange product group announced the public preview of a set of REST-based PowerShell cmdlets to replace some of the most popular (and in performance terms, most painful) traditional cmdlets. The new cmdlets are more reliable and robust and run 2-4 times faster than the older Remote PowerShell-based cmdlets (your mileage will vary). All good stuff.

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Introducing Teams Private Channels

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Microsoft launched private channels for Teams at the Ignite conference. This article describes the architecture and structure of private channels and discusses their intended usage. In a follow-up, I’ll go into how to create and manage private channels in a Teams deployment and discuss some of the issues you should consider when using this new feature.

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