Author: Tony Redmond

Latest Articles

Protecting Administrator Mailboxes from Phishing and Other Threats

Protecting Administrator Mailboxes from Phishing and Other Threats

One way to protect administrator mailboxes is not to use them. And if you want administrators to use separate mailboxes for their permissioned and non-permissioned activities, that's what you might do. However, we can be smarter and use transport rules to selectively block email sent to administrator mailboxes to dissuade internal people from sending email and blocking all but the most essential email coming in from external domains.

March 7, 2022
Microsoft Extends Support for Azure AD Graph API for Six Months

Microsoft Extends Support for Azure AD Graph API for Six Months

Microsoft has announced a six month extension for support of the Azure AD Graph API. The new deadline is the end of 2022, which gives Microsoft 365 tenants some extra time to convert PowerShell scripts which use the Azure AD and MSOL modules. The original deadline for retirement of the Azure AD license management cmdlets remains at June 30, 2022.

March 3, 2022
Diving into the Details of Microsoft Teams Shared Channels 72 Comments

Diving into the Details of Microsoft Teams Shared Channels

A year after announcing Teams shared channels, Microsoft is preparing to release the code into public preview in March 2022. The new collaboration mechanism uses Azure AD B2B Direct Connect instead of guest accounts, meaning that external members of shared channels use credentials issued by their home tenant to gain access. You'll need to configure a cross-tenant access policy to allow shared channels to work externally. Once that's done, the collaboration floodgates open.

February 23, 2022
Threat Explorer and Investigations: Useful Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Features 19 Comments

Threat Explorer and Investigations: Useful Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Features

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 (plan 2) contains the Threat Explorer feature. It's a useful way to investigate problematic messages which arrive in a tenant. The automated investigations feature can highlight messages containing malware by assembling evidence about warning signs in the message or its contents, and administrators can then action the recommendations up to and including the removal of messages already delivered to user mailboxes. Automating investigations is a good thing, if you afford Defender for Office 365 Plan 2.

February 21, 2022
Exchange Online Launches Support for MTA-STS 5 Comments

Exchange Online Launches Support for MTA-STS

Exchange Online now supports SMTP Strict Transport Security (MTA-STS), a mechanism to help defend SMTP communications between mail servers. Microsoft 365 tenants can decide if they want to enable MTA-STS for their domain by publishing a DNS record and an MTA-STS policy. You don't have to use MTA-STS, but it's a good idea to consider the option.

February 4, 2022
Bridging the Gap Between Microsoft Teams and Email 5 Comments

Bridging the Gap Between Microsoft Teams and Email

Teams is mostly an internal communications platform while email connects billions of people around the world. Inside Microsoft 365 tenants, you might need to connect Teams and email together. In this article, we discuss the out-of-the-box features available to link the two and describe some of the positive and negative points of each. You can certainly bridge the gap between Teams and email, but maybe Microsoft could grease the connection just a little more...

January 25, 2022
How to Transition from Exchange Online Mailbox Retention Policies to Microsoft 365 Retention 58 Comments

How to Transition from Exchange Online Mailbox Retention Policies to Microsoft 365 Retention

Exchange Online has mailbox retention policies. Microsoft 365 has retention policies and retention labels. In this article, we explore how to move away from Exchange Online retention to use Microsoft 365 retention. The transition makes it possible to use the advanced retention capabilities Microsoft is developing that will never show up in Exchange Online, so it's a good long-term goal to have even if it's not on your immediate work list.

January 20, 2022