Exchange Online has a new domain expiring soon alert, which means that a mail flow insight checks for soon-to-expire domains in the set of accepted domains for a tenant. When the insight detects a domain due to expire within 90, 60, and 30-day windows, it sends a high-severity alert to the tenant administrators to tell them that they should renew the domain(s).
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Anyone who can run a Microsoft Teams meeting can now run a webinar using a modified version of a standard Teams meeting. Microsoft is quite clever in extending the standard functionality to be able to deliver the features needed to publish and deliver a webinar. Some rough edges exist, but because running a webinar is very like running a regular meeting, you can expect that this will be an extremely popular new feature.
Microsoft experienced a failure with its Azure DNS servers on April 1. The issue was quickly resolved and the root cause determined to be a bug. That's all good, but Azure has suffered several recent problems which have affected other Microsoft cloud services from Office 365 to Bing to Xbox. Microsoft says they are taking action to remove the single point of failures in their infrastructure. Let's hope that they get the work done before the Microsoft cloud suffers a more widespread outage.
Microsoft has upgraded unified DLP policies to support the rich set of conditions, exceptions, and actions available for Exchange transport rule-based DLP policies. The upgrade means that organizations which have been forced to continue using ETR-based DLP policies can begin the process of moving over to unified DLP. This process won't be easy, but it's the right thing to do for the long term.
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Microsoft has clarified that the Teams Pro service plan is being added to Office 365 enterprise and Microsoft 365 business standard and premium licenses. Tenant admins don't have to do anything to add the new service plan as Microsoft will do this for them. Teams Pro adds the ability to differentiate product features across different types of user licenses. Teams Pro does not replace the Teams Advanced Communications add-on, but it needs an overhaul too.
In the second part of a two-part series, after going through the work to generate Viva Topics, it's time to expose the topic cards to apps. In this article, we explore how apps use topic cards, including the Office online apps and Microsoft 365 apps for enterprise. We also consider the experience of users within a tenant who don't have a license for Viva Topics. Finally, we ask the big question if Viva Topics is worth the $5/month fee per user asked for by Microsoft.
Viva Topics is the foundation of Microsoft's knowledge network. Substantial effort is needed to build the set of topics found in SharePoint Online content before apps can surface topic cards to users. This article is the first of a two-part series. In it, we chronicle the process of how the AI used by Viva Topics suggests topics and how knowledge managers refine and publish the topics to make them available to end users.
Twenty years after the release of SharePoint Portal Server 2001, SharePoint now powers document management in Microsoft 365. The event will be commemorated at a 20th anniversary SharePoint Saturday on March 27, 2021. All are welcome to celebrate this notable achievement for a fine product and a great user community.
Teams offers meeting organizers the ability to create an automatic transcript of conversations in meetings. For now, the feature is limited to the Teams desktop client and only for US English. The AI-based processing works well if people speak clearly and have good microphones, but even if a few bloopers exist in a transcript, it can be downloaded and fixed up in Word to create a permanent record. Overall, this is a very interesting and worthwhile feature to add to Teams meetings.
Azure AD suffered a major outage on Monday, March 15 2021 where authentication failures stopped Microsoft 365 users working. Apps which didn't need to authenticate keep on working while any which needed to prove its credentials ran into an immediate roadblock.
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is a feature of Office 365 E3 and E5 plans. Most DLP policies focus on matching sensitive information types created by Microsoft, like credit card numbers, but it is relatively easy to create a custom sensitive information type for use in DLP policies to detect information specific to your organization. In this example, we create a sensitive information type for Azure AD passwords and explore its use in Teams DLP policies.
Microsoft's Exchange Server woes continued when the online copy of the Hybrid Configuration Wizard was hijacked and replaced by a text file. The problem is now fixed, but it underlines the need for vigilance in all parts of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.
