In a January 15 announcement, Microsoft says that they have removed the previous restrictions that applied to purchases of Copilot for Microsoft 365 licenses. Office 365 E3 and E5 tenants can now buy and deploy Copilot and the requirement to buy a minimum of 300 licenses is gone. Suddenly, 2024 has become much more interesting from an AI perspective for many Office 365 tenants.
People have used Outlook's Junk Email Options for years to maintain sets of safe and blocked recipients. The possibility exists that Outlook's safe list might interfere with the processing of email by Exchange Online Protection. This article explores the feasibility of disabling Junk Email Options to use tenant-level blocks instead.
Microsoft 365 subscriptions are what tenants buy to access functionality. The service plans in the subscriptions (product licenses) control what features are available. This article explains how to use PowerShell to generate a report about subscriptions and the service plans in each license.
Exchange Online recipient filters calculate the membership of dynamic distribution groups. The filters support email addresses, but they don't work. Another method is needed to create dynamic distribution lists based on user mailbox email addresses, as we describe in this article and script.
Cmdlets from the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK are available to manage conditional access policies. The challenge in using PowerShell rather than the Entra ID admin center GUI is how policy settings are structured. But practice (and some experimentation) makes perfect, as we discuss in this article.
Sometimes tenants need to switch Microsoft 365 licenses for Entra ID user accounts, usually to upgrade functionality. This is easy to do manually for one or two accounts, but it's a boring exercise when you need to process more, especially when each account might have a different set of disabled service plans in the original license. This article explains how to process account licenses with PowerShell.
This article is a review of Microsoft 365 in 2023 covering topics like Copilot, the new Teams client, security, the ban on old servers sending email to Exchange Online, and Microsoft's ongoing attempts to monetize the installed base with premium products and add-ons.
The Exchange Managed Folder Assistant (MFA) is responsible for processing retention policies against Exchange Server and Exchange Online mailboxes. In this article, we review details of how the MFA works and how administrators can gain an insight into what it does.
A common question at conferences is how to start with Microsoft 365 PowerShell scripting. We all have our own approach. This article lays out a simple three-step method to write scripts to interact with Microsoft 365 objects.
The Invoke-HoldRemovalAction cmdlet is available in the compliance module. Its role is to remove obsolete eDiscovery holds from Exchange Online mailboxes and SharePoint Online sites. Old, lingering holds can prevent the removal of objects, so it's good to get rid of them.
Exchange Online keeps message trace data online for 10 days. If you want an email traffic report covering longer periods, you need to retrieve historical message data (for up to 90 days) and report that data. That's the easy description. This article explains some of the complexities involved in generating a 90-day email traffic report for a Microsoft 365 tenant.
Room mailboxes are a well-known part of Exchange Online. With a little planning, it's easy to add automated bookings for room mailboxes. In this example, we create a room mailbox and configure it to allow salespeople to book customer meetings during a conference.
