Blog

Latest Articles

Microsoft Replaces Office Graph Controls with Microsoft Graph Privacy Controls 12 Comments

Microsoft Replaces Office Graph Controls with Microsoft Graph Privacy Controls

The Office Graph powers Microsoft 365 applications like Delve. Six years after Delve's introduction, its privacy controls are being replaced by Microsoft Graph tenant settings from May 15, 2021. The changeover is important if your Office 365 tenant includes some people who have excluded themselves from document insights. You should take action to replace the old Office Delve controls with the Microsoft Graph privacy controls.

April 28, 2021
Inventorying Permissions Assigned to Azure AD Apps 10 Comments

Inventorying Permissions Assigned to Azure AD Apps

Many apps are created in the Azure AD for a tenant. Those apps have permissions to allow them to access data, and consent for those permissions are granted by administrators and users. How often do you check what apps are known in your Azure AD and what permissions those apps have? In this article, we review how to use the Graph API and PowerShell to create a report inventorying apps and permissions. What you do with that data is up to you!

April 26, 2021
How to Plan Your Slack-to-Teams Project 2 Comments

How to Plan Your Slack-to-Teams Project

Successful migration projects necessitate extensive planning, and a Slack-to-Teams migration project is no different. The good news is there are some basic things you can do in Slack to scope your project's complexity and drive your plan. This article gives practical advice on how to scope your Slack environment and make your Teams Migration plan.

April 20, 2021
The Practical 365 Update: S2, Ep 16 – Critical Exchange patches, new Teams and OneDrive features and we deep-dive on Information Barriers

The Practical 365 Update: S2, Ep 16 – Critical Exchange patches, new Teams and OneDrive features and we deep-dive on Information Barriers

On the show this week, Steve is joined by Patrick van Bemmelen to talk about how you can stop internal sharing with Information Barriers., And in important news we discuss the latest Exchange Server updates you need to apply TODAY, how the FBI have been accessing Exchange Servers - and we cover the latest updates available for Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, Outlook and more.

April 16, 2021
Microsoft Patches Four More Exchange Server Vulnerabilities as the FBI Moves to Clean Infected Servers 2 Comments

Microsoft Patches Four More Exchange Server Vulnerabilities as the FBI Moves to Clean Infected Servers

Microsoft has released security patches to address four new remote code vulnerabilities in Exchange 2013,2016, and 2019. At the same time, the FBI has removed web shells from compromised servers, but only in the U.S. Now more than ever it is essential that Exchange Server administrators apply all available patches and make sure that their servers have no lingering surprises left behind by attackers.

April 15, 2021
Exchange Online Launches Expiring Domain Insight (and Causes a Little Confusion) 7 Comments

Exchange Online Launches Expiring Domain Insight (and Causes a Little Confusion)

Exchange Online has a new domain expiring soon alert, which means that a mail flow insight checks for soon-to-expire domains in the set of accepted domains for a tenant. When the insight detects a domain due to expire within 90, 60, and 30-day windows, it sends a high-severity alert to the tenant administrators to tell them that they should renew the domain(s).

April 14, 2021
Why Microsoft 365 Audit Logs Lack Proper Fit and Finish 3 Comments

Why Microsoft 365 Audit Logs Lack Proper Fit and Finish

The audit events generated for license assignments to user accounts available in the Azure AD audit log and Office 365 audit log are inconsistent and incomplete. This is certainly true for licenses assigned to accounts through auto-claim policies and group-based licensing, but known gaps exist in the audit records generated in other areas of Office 365 and Microsoft 365 functionality. We think Microsoft needs to pay attention to ensure that auditing works consistently and predictably across all workloads. Once they improve the fit and finish of audit record generation, they can move into other areas, like charging for access to high-value audit events.

April 14, 2021
Teams Meetings Get Webinar Capability 48 Comments
Microsoft Teams Webinar

Teams Meetings Get Webinar Capability

Anyone who can run a Microsoft Teams meeting can now run a webinar using a modified version of a standard Teams meeting. Microsoft is quite clever in extending the standard functionality to be able to deliver the features needed to publish and deliver a webinar. Some rough edges exist, but because running a webinar is very like running a regular meeting, you can expect that this will be an extremely popular new feature.

April 12, 2021
Azure’s DNS Problem Highlights Fallibility in Cloud Services One comment

Azure’s DNS Problem Highlights Fallibility in Cloud Services

Microsoft experienced a failure with its Azure DNS servers on April 1. The issue was quickly resolved and the root cause determined to be a bug. That's all good, but Azure has suffered several recent problems which have affected other Microsoft cloud services from Office 365 to Bing to Xbox. Microsoft says they are taking action to remove the single point of failures in their infrastructure. Let's hope that they get the work done before the Microsoft cloud suffers a more widespread outage.

April 9, 2021
Time to Move from Exchange DLP Policies to Unified DLP Policies 12 Comments

Time to Move from Exchange DLP Policies to Unified DLP Policies

Microsoft has upgraded unified DLP policies to support the rich set of conditions, exceptions, and actions available for Exchange transport rule-based DLP policies. The upgrade means that organizations which have been forced to continue using ETR-based DLP policies can begin the process of moving over to unified DLP. This process won't be easy, but it's the right thing to do for the long term.

April 7, 2021