Microsoft 365

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Consumption Models and Potential Cost Introduced by Microsoft’s New Teams APIs Require Careful Calculation 2 Comments

Consumption Models and Potential Cost Introduced by Microsoft’s New Teams APIs Require Careful Calculation

Along with the general availability of a new Graph Export API for Teams, Microsoft is introducing new licensing and charging models. Understanding the charging incurred for different uses will take some time to sort out and could pose real challenges for ISVs working in the migration space. Developers need to understand terms like model A and model B, seeded capacity, and consumption units and how these apply to their apps. The question now is if this is a test bed for Microsoft to apply similar charges to other APIs.

October 5, 2021
Getting the Most out of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Policies 4 Comments

Getting the Most out of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Policies

This article examines the different components of Defender for Office 365, and how you can customize the configuration beyond the baselines to enhance the relevance and impact the policies have on your tenant. The most important aspects to review when modifying the configuration from baselines and the reasons to consider each configuration option are highlighted, but they don’t take you all the way. The items listed here are a subset of what’s available, but when combined with the baselines will help you to bring your Defender implementation to the next level.

October 1, 2021
Contemplating Commsverse

Contemplating Commsverse

Paul Robichaux provides insights from the independent Microsoft Teams conference, Commsverse, that just took place last week at Mercedez-Benz World outside of London.

September 21, 2021
Why Aren’t You Creating Bots for Microsoft Teams?

Why Aren’t You Creating Bots for Microsoft Teams?

Building a bot used to require developer skills - writing complicated code, deploying it to a resource like Azure, and then performing cumbersome configuration steps to ensure it functioned properly. Now, with the Power Virtual Agents (PVA) app for Microsoft Teams, you can create exceptionally powerful chatbots without having to write a single line of code. What’s more, you don’t need direct access to Azure resources to deploy these bots. There’s no reason to not create a bot for your organization today.

September 16, 2021
P365 Goes to Commsverse!

P365 Goes to Commsverse!

Mike Weaver, Paul Robichaux and Steve Goodman head to Commsverse on Sept 15 & 16 at Mercedez-Benz World just outside of London, UK. Learn more about the hybrid conference as well as the session that Mike and Paul are hosting together - 'Teams Tenant-to-Tenant Challenges: It Just Keeps Getting Worse!'

September 13, 2021
How to Convert Azure B2B Guest Users to Members While Maintaining User Collaboration 19 Comments

How to Convert Azure B2B Guest Users to Members While Maintaining User Collaboration

Azure B2B guest accounts are often created during a Merger & Acquisition, so teams from both organizations can easily collaborate during the business and technology integration. However, these external users with B2B Guest accounts in their directory will eventually need to be migrated, which is problematic since B2B Guest accounts aren’t recognized as being licensed. The guest account can be removed and a new one created, but previous permissions would be lost. So how do we preserve permissions, keep collaborating without managing two sets of credentials while preparing the user account for data migrations? This article walks you through a solution that can be used in certain situations to help you easily manage the account to meet your needs.

September 8, 2021
Why can’t you remove the last Exchange Server? 12 Comments

Why can’t you remove the last Exchange Server?

So, you've completed your migration to Exchange Online. Email flows smoothly into and out of the cloud, and all your mailboxes are now online. What's next for your Exchange Servers, now that you've made the transition? After completion you will have several tasks to perform to remove Exchange Servers from your environment, but there is one important caveat you need to know about; if you run Azure AD Connect then you can't remove every Exchange Server from your environment. You will need to keep at least one around for management purposes. In this article, I'll walk through what you can do to minimise what you keep and need to maintain, and what you can consider planning for in the future. You can also join me at TEC this week, on September 2nd.

August 30, 2021
Teams Advanced Communications Add-on (Version 2) Ready to Go 4 Comments

Teams Advanced Communications Add-on (Version 2) Ready to Go

After a false start in 2020, Microsoft is coming back with version 2 of the Teams Advanced Communications add-on. The documentation lists four new capabilities. You'll have to make your mind up whether these features are worth whatever Microsoft asks for in terms of add-on pricing. We probably won't have that information until the preview phase of the features terminates at the end of 2021. I can't wait!

August 26, 2021
Microsoft to Increase Prices for Office 365 and Microsoft 365 in March 2022 7 Comments

Microsoft to Increase Prices for Office 365 and Microsoft 365 in March 2022

After a decade of no price increases for Office 365 licenses, Microsoft plans to introduce new pricing effective March 1, 2022. The uplifts range from $3 to $4 extra per user per month. This doesn't sound much, but an extra $36 per user per year for Office 365 E3 quickly mounts up. And when you look at the overall installed base, some eyewatering numbers are involved. While we might complain about increases, I still think Office 365 and Microsoft 365 are reasonable value.

August 19, 2021
Microsoft 365 Support for IE11 Stops Today 2 Comments

Microsoft 365 Support for IE11 Stops Today

From August 17, 2021, Microsoft 365 apps no longer support IE11 (the Teams browser client dropped support last year). IE11 fans need to move to a new browser. Microsoft would prefer if you choose the Edge browser, but anything but IE11 should do a better job in the future.

August 17, 2021