Author: Tony Redmond

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Copilot for Microsoft 365: Datacenter Investments, Customer Spend, and Black Hat Exploits

• Post author:By Tony Redmond

Market analysts question if companies like Microsoft will ever generate a return on their AI investment. That hasn't stopped Microsoft spending $19 billion in FY24 Q4, so they must be hopeful. Meanwhile, at Black Hat USA 2024, a presentation exploring some vulnerabilities in Copilot should make all Microsoft 365 tenants with Copilot consider how to secure their organization better.

• Blog

August 12, 2024

3 Comments

Using the Azure Email Communication Service to Send Messages

• Post author:By Tony Redmond

If you're looking for an email service capable of handling large volumes of email to external recipients, Microsoft will propose Email Communication Services (ECS). Built on top of Exchange Online, ECS shares some characteristics with the High Volume Email (HVE) solution. After testing both, HVE is probably a better solution if you have a Microsoft 365 tenant.

• Blog

August 6, 2024

One comment

The New Outlook for Windows Reaches General Availability

• Post author:By Tony Redmond

The new Outlook for Windows client is generally available, which means that Microsoft supports it for product usage. That's all fine for those who want to use the new client once they understand that a considerable functionality gap still exists between the new Outlook and Outlook classic. Fortunately, Microsoft will support Outlook classic until "at least 2029."

• Blog

August 1, 2024

21 Comments

Exchange Online’s New High Volume Email (HVE) Solution

• Post author:By Tony Redmond

The Exchange Online High-Volume Email (HVE) solution handles up to 100,000 internal messages and 2,000 external messages daily. It's intended to replace on-premises Exchange servers that organizations keep just to service email submission from devices and applications. In this review of the preview version, we discovered that almost everything works just fine, if you keep within the throttling limits.

• Exchange Online

July 30, 2024

6 Comments

Using Entra ID Classifications with Microsoft 365 Groups

• Post author:By Tony Redmond

Entra ID classifications don't seem very exciting because they're text-only visual markers for Microsoft 365 groups and teams that don't come with any of the intelligence built into sensitivity labels. However, classifications can do a useful job for Microsoft 365 tenants that don't have the necessary licenses for sensitivity labels or who don't want to implement sensitivity labels.

• Entra ID

July 22, 2024

6 Comments

Practical Graph: Using GitHub Copilot for Microsoft 365 PowerShell Development

• Post author:By Tony Redmond

GitHub Copilot costs $10/month. At that price level, anyone working with PowerShell should try out the AI assistance to see if it helps. But will GitHub Copilot work well with Microsoft 365 PowerShell modules like Exchange Online and the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK. That's what we tested and report on here.

• PowerShell

July 16, 2024

18 Comments

Practical Graph: Assign Sensitivity Labels to SharePoint Online Files

• Post author:By Tony Redmond

Microsoft released Graph APIs to read and assign sensitivity labels in 2023. At the time, it was difficult to work with the assignSensitivityLabel API. Now it's easier, and this article explains how to use PowerShell with the API to assign labels to files in a SharePoint Online document library.

• PowerShell

July 10, 2024

2 Comments

Practical Graph: Microsoft Launches Entra PowerShell Module

• Post author:By Tony Redmond

On June 27, 2024, Microsoft launched the preview of the Entra PowerShell module. Built on top of the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK, the new module helps organizations that still have PowerShell scripts based on the now-deprecated AzureAD and AzureADPreview modules. If you're in that situation, the Entra module might help. But I recommend using the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK instead.

• PowerShell

July 1, 2024

2 Comments

TEC 2024 PowerShell Script-Off

• Post author:By Tony Redmond

TEC 2024 in Dallas (October 1-2) will once again feature the TEC PowerShell Script-Off where coders attempt to come up with the best solutions for challenges set by the judges. The challenges are all Microsoft 365 scenarios (Exchange Online, Entra ID, Teams, and SharePoint Online), so there's nothing unknown about what we'll ask people to code. Come along to TEC 2024 and compete to be the best coder in town!

• PowerShell

June 28, 2024

Practical Graph: Report Details of Teams Online Meetings

• Post author:By Tony Redmond

The arrival of new Teams audit events allows tenants to analyze data about Teams online meetings. However, the data available in the audit events is incomplete, and the only way to get a full picture is through the Graph APIs. This article explains how to find Teams Online meetings in user calendars, extract information about the meetings, and generate an HTML report.

• Teams

June 26, 2024

6 Comments

Block Copilot Access to Individual Office Documents

• Post author:By Tony Redmond

A new sensitivity label setting blocks access to content services for Office applications. In effect, this stops any feature that depends on the ability to send content to Microsoft for processing, including Copilot for Microsoft 365, DLP, text prediction, and so on. It's a precise item-level block that protects sensitive documents from being consumed and used by Copilot in the text that it generates.

• SharePoint Online

June 24, 2024

Practical Graph: Find Ownerless and Memberless Groups with Graph APIs

• Post author:By Tony Redmond

Over time, it's likely that some of the groups in a Microsoft 365 tenant will fall into either the category of memberless groups or ownerless groups. Microsoft has a solution to manage ownerless Microsoft 365 groups, but not the other group types supports by the Graph. This article explains how to find and report memberless groups using the Get-MgGroup cmdlet.

• PowerShell

June 19, 2024