Author: Tony Redmond

Latest Articles

Exchange Server Subscription Edition Arrives in Summer 2025

Microsoft has announced that Exchange Server Subscription Edition (SE) will appear in summer 2025. You'll be able to do an inplace upgrade from Exchange Server 2019 CU15 or a "legacy upgrade" (hardware switchover) for other versions. The initial version of Exchange Server SE is unexciting, perhaps deliberately so. It's all about getting customers to transition to the subscription model.

May 7, 2024

Restricted SharePoint Search is The Legacy of Previous Microsoft Collaboration Strategies

Microsoft has been forced to introduce restricted SharePoint search to allow customers to deploy Copilot for Microsoft 365 projects without worrying that Copilot will find and reuse information from across the entire tenant. It's a sad legacy of previous Microsoft collaboration strategies, notably the decision to allow users to create groups without hindrance.

April 30, 2024

Using Entra ID Support for Passkey Authentication with Microsoft 365

Entra ID supports passkeys as an authentication method. In fact, support is a variation of the existing FIDO2 authentication method using device-bound passkeys managed by the Microsoft Authenticator app. Passkeys are a strong phishing-proof authentication method. The question is whether the current implementation will be considered too complicated by regular users.

April 23, 2024

Translating SharePoint Online Documents

SharePoint Translation is a SharePoint Premium service that can translate the content of Office documents and PDF files to the languages supported by the Microsoft Translator service. Be careful about the costs, which can be heavy if you process large documents.

April 9, 2024

Using the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK to Create Planner Tasks

In the past, we've described how to use PowerShell to report tasks in Planner plans. This article completes the circle by discussing how to create Planner tasks. The scenario used is synchronizing Microsoft 365 message center notifications to create tasks in a target plan. There are some interesting issues to discuss, like how to assign a label to a task.

March 19, 2024

Cleaning Out Old Messages from a Team Channel

A question asked about the best way to remove channel messages from Teams. Microsoft 365 retention policies are an option, but you'll have to wait for retention processing to complete. PowerShell helps because you can create a script to remove all messages and replies from a channel. Everything works, but processing is slow, as we discover when we plunge into the details of writing code.

March 6, 2024