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.
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.
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.
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.
Microsoft has issued critical security updates for Exchange on-premises servers. The fixes close off four known vulnerabilities which expose Exchange to day-zero attacks. It's important to apply these updates ASAP.
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.
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.
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.
