Author: Tony Redmond

Latest Articles

Attack on Exchange Servers Gives Impetus to Move Email to the Cloud 31 Comments

Attack on Exchange Servers Gives Impetus to Move Email to the Cloud

The Hafnium attack on thousands of on-premises Exchange servers is a wake-up call for their administrators and the organizations using the email service. Ten years ago, it was a reasonable decision to stay on-premises. Five years ago, you could argue the same case and companies with bad network connectivity to the internet or specific security requirements were happy to stay on-premises. Now? In a world of increasing threat, staying on-premises looks a lot more risky. For most, it's time to move to the cloud.

March 8, 2021
Microsoft Walks Away from UserVoice 10 Comments

Microsoft Walks Away from UserVoice

Microsoft is closing down the UserVoice sites created to allow customers submit ideas and feedback about products. Some sites are already closed and others will close in the near future. There's no news about what the replacement platform will be or if Microsoft will be able to migrate existing content from UserVoice.

March 5, 2021
How to Co-author Office Documents Protected by Sensitivity Labels 24 Comments

How to Co-author Office Documents Protected by Sensitivity Labels

Microsoft has released a preview of co-authoring for protected (encrypted) Office documents using the desktop apps. While it might seem straightforward to enable co-authoring (and the online apps have been able to do this for over a year), making it work for the Office desktop apps requires a complex mix of Office, SharePoint Online, the OneDrive sync client, and sensitivity labels. Once everything lines up, it works beautifully, even if you can't take a screenshot to prove that it works.

March 4, 2021
Microsoft Teams Connect aka Shared Channels Coming Later in 2021 24 Comments

Microsoft Teams Connect aka Shared Channels Coming Later in 2021

Microsoft Teams Connect, a new way of collaboration based on federated shared channels, is now in private preview and should be available later in 2021. The best thing about shared channels is that you don't need to switch tenants to access a channel in another tenant. Azure B2B collaboration (guest accounts) is still important, but this is a brand new way of working that should be very popular.

March 2, 2021
Microsoft Makes Teams Multi-Geo

Microsoft Makes Teams Multi-Geo

At the Ignite 2021 event, Microsoft announced that Teams will have multi-geo capabilities later this year. The same $2/user/month uplift as used for other multi-geo workloads applies to Teams. The announcement is not unexpected. Teams consumes services from Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Microsoft 365 Groups, all of which are already multi-geo capable.

March 2, 2021
OneDrive Gets a New Warning and Microsoft Clarifies that 250 GB File Size Limit

OneDrive Gets a New Warning and Microsoft Clarifies that 250 GB File Size Limit

Microsoft has introduced a first file delete warning in the OneDrive sync client. The new warning is flagged after a user deletes a file in a synchronized location and continues until they turn the warning off. The idea is that people might not realize how the OneDrive recycle bin works. Also in the OneDrive world, Microsoft confirmed that OneDrive for Business supports the 250 GB limit for file uploads some six weeks after the feature was originally announced with some confusion if it applied to business users. Now it does, so all is well.

February 28, 2021
Teams Template Policies Now Available in Admin Center 2 Comments

Teams Template Policies Now Available in Admin Center

The Teams admin center now includes the ability to create template policies to control the set of templates shown to users when creating new teams. It's a small but important change that allows organizations to show only the templates it wants to users instead of being forced to show the set of default templates created by Microsoft. New templates are automatically included in template policies.

February 26, 2021
Recent Improvements Rolling Out to Make Teams Meetings Better 11 Comments

Recent Improvements Rolling Out to Make Teams Meetings Better

Microsoft has released several improvements to Teams meetings to make these gatherings more functional and easier to use. The features range from giving video feeds priority in the gallery view to reactions in meetings to allow participants to show what they really think about a presentation. It's all grist to the mill in the battle for corporate online meeting domination between Teams and Zoom.

February 26, 2021
A New Start at Practical365.com

A New Start at Practical365.com

As some of you might have noticed, Tony Redmond has joined the Practical365.com team to write for the site covering a range of Microsoft 365 topics. We're looking for more writers to join the team. People with fantastic knowledge and insight about how Microsoft 365 technology really works. That kind of thing...

February 24, 2021
SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business are Kissing Cousins and Now Share an Admin Center

SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business are Kissing Cousins and Now Share an Admin Center

In an utterly predictable move, the SharePoint Online admin center is absorbing the functionality of the OneDrive for Business admin center. Some settings have already moved across and you can expect the OneDrive admin center to go into the great byte wastebasket in mid-2021. This consolidation barely dents the number of admin centers active within Microsoft 365. All of which makes tenant administration more tiresome than it needs to be.

February 23, 2021
Teams Approvals App Delivers Simple Workflow 2 Comments

Teams Approvals App Delivers Simple Workflow

The new Teams Approvals app delivers simple workflow capabilities built on top of Power Automate and Dataverse. The simplicity is attractive and makes the app very easy to use, but maybe it's a little too simple to handle the kind of workflow scenarios proposed by Microsoft. It will certainly be interesting to see how tenants use the Approvals app in their deployments.

February 22, 2021