In our 2024 review of Microsoft 365, we consider some of the major technical advances that occured in Microsoft's cloud ecosystem in 2024 together with some upcoming changes that have the potential to affect tenant operations. As always, our choice of what's important and what's not might not match yours, so feel free to comment and voice your opinion.
This article describes what happens when the Connect-MgGraph cmdlet runs in interactive and app-only sessions with the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK. A session is created and a context is established, and it's possible to use the session context to do real work.
Given the widespread use of guest accounts within Microsoft 365 to allow external sharing of resources, it’s almost inevitable that some unused guest accounts exist in any Microsoft 365 tenant. Identifying unused guest accounts is a good management practice. If the accounts serve no purpose, why keep them? This article explores how to find unused guest accounts. What you do with them later is up to you.
Microsoft has a new allInteractionHistory Graph API in beta. The API returns details of user interactions with Microsoft 365 Copilot apps, like Copilot in Word and Copilot in Outlook at a much more detailed level than what is available in the usage report API. Despite the current flaws in the API, having access to detailed information about how people use technology is incredibly valuable.
You can't prevent Microsoft 365 Chat finding documents based on searches against Microsoft 365 Search and the semantic index. But you can stop Copilot from using the content of sensitive documents in its summaries and generated text. This article explains how the different ways to block Copilot in Microsoft 365 work.
Since its inception, the Teams user interface has emphasize teams and channels for collaboration. But that's not how people work, and the new chat and channels experience emphasizes chats a lot more. This doesn't mean that channels are going away. They remain the foundation of teams and the right way to communicate and share information for ongoing use, but the change to highlight chats might take some getting used to.
Entra ID sign-in data is a valuable source of information for Microsoft 365 tenant administrators. Although you can browse sign-in data through the Entra admin center, working with the data through PowerShell reveals all sorts of possibilities for analysis to answer questions about who is connecting to your tenant.
Every time Microsoft 365 Copilot interacts with a user, the Microsoft 365 substrate captures the Copilot interaction as a compliance record in the user's mailbox. By fetching and analyzing the compliance records, we can understand how the user interacts with Copilot. This article discusses how to retrieve and analyze the records with the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK.
Sometimes Microsoft 365 tenants need to store specific data for objects like users and groups. The Graph provides several extensibility options. This article describes how to define and use schema extensions to store information about the container management labels assigned to Microsoft 365 Groups.
Compliance search purge actions are Microsoft's search and purge tool. Today, a purge action is limited to removing 10 items per mailbox. Microsoft is increasing the limit to 100 as part of its eDiscovery modernization project. This article reviews the state of the art for using PowerShell to purge mailbox items and contemplates how purges might work after modernization finishes.
It's time to check recipient filters for dynamic distribution groups to ensure that you don't have any wildcard prefixes used with the -eq operator to find recipients based on their email addresses. A November 30 update will stop this kind of recipient filter working, and might have a knock-on effect on other processes.
The deployment of intelligent versioning to SharePoint Online worldwide is proceeding. Intelligent versioning is all about reducing the amount of storage quota consumed by file edits. It's a great idea, but it has one downside for many Microsoft 365 tenants: retention policies and labels stop SharePoint removing unwanted versions. Read more here, including a script to interpret Microsoft file version data.
