Author: Tony Redmond

Latest Articles

Getting Exchange Online Distribution List Membership Counts with PowerShell 15 Comments
Exchange Online Powershell

Getting Exchange Online Distribution List Membership Counts with PowerShell

It's important to know if a tenant has any very large distribution lists as these might be the source of reply-all mail storms. An old article explains how to report the membership counts for distribution lists on an on-premises Exchange server. Life is different in the cloud, and we need to take a different approach. This article explains how to use different calls in a PowerShell script to create a nice report about distribution list memberships.

June 7, 2021
Deploying Custom Teams Group Policy Assignments
Microsoft Teams

Deploying Custom Teams Group Policy Assignments

Microsoft Teams uses an array of policies to control the features available to end users. Group policy assignments make it easier to assign packages of policies to groups of users. Microsoft provides a set of policy packages out of the box, and organizations can create custom packages. That is, if they have the Teams Advanced Communications license. Demanding a special license for functionality which helps tenants manage Teams better seems excessive, especially as you could relatively easily recreate policy assignments with PowerShell.

June 3, 2021
Upgrade Your Exchange Online Scripts to Use the Get-EXOMailbox Cmdlet 6 Comments

Upgrade Your Exchange Online Scripts to Use the Get-EXOMailbox Cmdlet

Many Exchange Online scripts use the old Get-Mailbox cmdlet to fetch mailbox data. It's time to change these calls out and replace them with Get-ExoMailbox. The new cmdlet is faster than the old and more resilient in its ability to handle server glitches. There's no reason to continue using the old Remote PowerShell cmdlets unless you like slowness and errors.

May 26, 2021
Talking Teams with Rish Tandon
Microsoft Teams

Talking Teams with Rish Tandon

Tony Redmond sat down (virtually) with Rish Tandon, Corporate VP for Microsoft Teams Development, to discuss how Teams has evolved over the last few years. The conversation was wide-ranging and covered many topics, including the operationalization of Teams to create a service capable of running at massive scale, client performance, compliance, backups, people, the effect of Teams on other Microsoft 365 workloads, and more.

May 24, 2021
Microsoft Extends Teams Retention Policies to All Licensed Office 365 Accounts

Microsoft Extends Teams Retention Policies to All Licensed Office 365 Accounts

Microsoft announced a bunch of changes for Microsoft 365 records management on May 19. The most interesting changes are allowing all licenses Office 365 accounts to use Teams retention policies and the advent of adaptive scopes for retention policies, both of which should be useful for many tenants. The announcement also covers multi-stage disposition reviews. If you know what that means, you'll be excited. If not, you won't.

May 20, 2021
Microsoft Updates Outlook to use Advanced Settings for Sensitivity Labels 24 Comments
Sensitivity Labels

Microsoft Updates Outlook to use Advanced Settings for Sensitivity Labels

Updates to Outlook clients (desktop, mobile, and OWA) respect the advanced settings in label policy which previously needed the deployment of the unified labeling client. Many organizations want to use mandatory labeling, but have been frustrated because of the lack of support in the Office applications. Now support is available, so it's time to label that email!

May 19, 2021
Microsoft Updates Viva Insights App with Wellbeing Features

Microsoft Updates Viva Insights App with Wellbeing Features

A new version of the Microsoft Viva Insights app for Teams includes some of the promised wellbeing functionality designed to help stressed users get through the work day more easily. You can praise co-workers, learn to breathe and relax, note your current state of wellness, and take a virtual commute to wrap up the working day. Some people will love the app, others will wonder what the fuss is all about. It's a very personal thing, which I guess is the nature of Viva Insights.

May 14, 2021
New-DistributionGroup: A PowerShell Cmdlet Which Gets No Respect 9 Comments
Powershell New-DistributionGroup

New-DistributionGroup: A PowerShell Cmdlet Which Gets No Respect

The New-DistributionGroup cmdlet has been in Exchange since 2006. It creates a new distribution list that is easily populated with a few commands. Although Microsoft might like everyone to use the new-fangled Microsoft 365 Groups, the fact remains that distribution lists are very useful. So much so that many millions are still in active use. In this article, we explore how to create new standard and dynamic distribution lists with PowerShell.

May 12, 2021
Microsoft’s Plan to Create EU Data Boundary for Cloud Services by the End of 2022 2 Comments

Microsoft’s Plan to Create EU Data Boundary for Cloud Services by the End of 2022

Microsoft posted details of its EU Data Boundary plan on May 6 to cover the storage and processing of personal and commercial data used by Microsoft cloud services. The plan is due to be achieved by the end of 2022 and Microsoft says that they have considered the engineering and technical challenges. A quick look at a European Office 365 tenant reveals that many services run in the U.S., so there's lots of work to do.

May 6, 2021
How to Monitor Changes to Sensitivity Labels Used for Container Management 10 Comments

How to Monitor Changes to Sensitivity Labels Used for Container Management

Sensitivity labels are an effective way to manage containers like Teams, Microsoft 365 Groups, and SharePoint sites. Microsoft doesn't provide any way to track changes made to labels assigned to containers, which means that a group owner can downgrade the policy assigned through a label. This article explains a method to detect when label changes occur for containers and how to revert those changes if necessary.

May 4, 2021