Author: Tony Redmond

Latest Articles

Microsoft Ignite 2023 Emphasizes Copilot

As is the norm for any Microsoft conference, the Microsoft Ignite 2023 announcements came thick and fast. Most of the announcements featured a heavy emphasis on some form of Copilot. Quite how useful all this AI-powered assistance will be in real life remains to be seen. Here's the Practical365 take on the important Microsoft 365 announcements at Ignite.

November 15, 2023

Building a Teams External Access Allow List from External Chats

A Teams external access whitelist controls the domains that users can connect to for federated chats. Organizations often limit federation using a whitelist to reduce the possibility of attacks through chat communications. This article explains how administrators can discover the set of domains users chat with by analyzing chat information using the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK.

November 7, 2023

Reusing User Principal Names and Primary SMTP Addresses

Microsoft 365 user accounts have user principal names (for sign in) and primary SMTP addresses (to receive email). Is it a good idea to reuse user principal names or SMTP addresses that become available when an employee leaves the organization. It might seem like a good idea, but it's really not and should be avoided. We explain why here.

October 17, 2023

Teams 2.1 Client Hits General Availability

On October 5, 2023, Microsoft announced the general availability of the new Teams 2.1 client. Based on a new architecture and promising better performance and lower system resource usage, Teams 2.1 is available for Windows and macOS desktops and browsers. The signs are good as the client has been in public preview since March, but we'll only really know how successful the client is after several months of use.

October 5, 2023

Using an Azure Automation Runbook to Remove Teams Chat Threads

A previous article explains how to delete Teams chats using an interactive Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK session. This article builds on that information and explains how to use an Azure Automation runbook to find and remove specified chat threads by scanning all user accounts. The results of the scan and any removed chat threads are emailed to a nominated address at the end of processing.

September 25, 2023