Launched on June 28, 2011, Office 365 is ten years old. The effect of Microsoft's cloud office system has been profound on corporate IT. In this article, we reflect on some of the major developments relating to Office 365 since 2011.
It's a good idea to replace older calls to the Get-Mailbox cmdlet with Get-ExoMailbox. However, it's not just a matter of cut and paste updates. In some cases, the nature of the new REST-based cmdlets mean that some additional care is necessary to ensure that the updated code works as expected. As we examine in this article, filters are just one example where some attention to detail is needed to make sure Exchange Online delivers the right set of mailbox data.
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Scheduler for Microsoft 365 is a new meeting scheduling service launched with a $10/month price tag (per user). Scheduler and Cortana work together to find the most suitable meeting times for participants to get together. Scheduler works for any kind of attendees (as long as they can receive email) and the big pay-out is that you can ask Cortana to set things up and leave the meeting for artificial intelligence to sort out. Sometimes things don't work out and humans need to get involved, and that's when privacy concerns come into play. If you can cope with the issues and have a lot of meetings to organize, Scheduler for Microsoft 365 might do a job for you.
An earlier article explained how to create organizational contacts in user mailboxes with Graph API calls. This article builds on that idea with three improvements. First, we select target mailboxes for update by looking for those added in the last month. Second, we allow any mail-enabled recipient to be added as an organizational contact. Third, we incorporate some code to check if a contact already exists in a mailbox. Like anything with PowerShell, this code can be improved..
Microsoft has delayed the release of the June 2021 cumulative updates for Exchange Server for two weeks to integrate the Windows Antimalware Scan interface (AMSI). The change will allow Exchange 2016 and Exchange 2019 servers running on Windows Server 2016 or later to integrate antimalware engines to check HTTP requests for potential problems. If ever there was good reason to delay an update, this is it.
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The Outlook Places service uses metadata stored for conference rooms and room lists to help users find suitable meeting places. The metadata surfaces in Outlook's Room Finder component (shared between OWA and Outlook desktop). Obviously, the better populated the room metadata is, the more useful it will be, once we all start meeting in conference rooms again!
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Many PowerShell scripts use the Send-MailMessage cmdlet to send mail. That's fine, but if you want to remove basic authentication to improve tenant security, you need to stop using Send-MailMessage. One solution is to move to use the Graph API SendMail call. This works fine, but it creates some new security issues that need to be thought through. In this article, we explain how to use the Graph to send email and some of those security considerations to ponder.
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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.
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.
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A variety of methods exist to block access to a user's Entra ID account from a complete block to a conditional access policy. In this article, we examine the various methods and debate the worth of each approach. Conditional access policies are the cleanest and most effective long-term solution, but you need Entra ID P1 licenses. If you don't have those licenses, maybe one of the other approaches will work for you.
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.
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.
