Microsoft 365

Latest Articles

Office 365 Ten Years On

Launched on June 28, 2011, Office 365 is ten years old. The effect of Microsoft's cloud office system has been profound on corporate IT. In this article, we reflect on some of the major developments relating to Office 365 since 2011.

June 28, 2021

Skype for Business Online is retiring – What does it mean?

July 31st, 2021, is the day that Skype for Business Online (SfBO) officially retires. What does that mean for you and your users? It means just that, that SfBO will not be available in Microsoft 365 anymore, and Teams Only mode will be the only option for users homed in Microsoft 365. In this article, Stale Hansen explains the different transition options available, shows how to flip your tenant over to Teams Only mode yourself, and offers some best practices based on personal experience.

June 18, 2021
Scheduler for Microsoft 365 Debuts 2 Comments
Using Cortana and Scheduler for Microsoft 365 AI voice command

Scheduler for Microsoft 365 Debuts

Scheduler for Microsoft 365 is a new meeting scheduling service launched with a $10/month price tag (per user). Scheduler and Cortana work together to find the most suitable meeting times for participants to get together. Scheduler works for any kind of attendees (as long as they can receive email) and the big pay-out is that you can ask Cortana to set things up and leave the meeting for artificial intelligence to sort out. Sometimes things don't work out and humans need to get involved, and that's when privacy concerns come into play. If you can cope with the issues and have a lot of meetings to organize, Scheduler for Microsoft 365 might do a job for you.

June 17, 2021

Managing Office 365 Quarantine Confusion

The email quarantine process is as old as email itself, and still an essential part of any email service. As far as Office 365 is concerned, Exchange Online is a world-class product and the quarantine mechanism works well, however, the current iteration of the Quarantine portal falls short in user experience and performance.

June 10, 2021
Taming Teams Notifications
Microsoft Teams notifications

Taming Teams Notifications

There are several areas where Microsoft could improve the way Teams handles out-of-office and away-from-work scenarios. Are the default "quiet hours" reasonable? Should there be a global setting for quiet hours or do-not-disturb? While there may be good reasons to leave some of these as a tenant-level settings, you don't want to forget about the extra steps you must take to truly escape from Teams for a bit.

June 4, 2021
Creating Custom B2B Guest User Invitations with Graph API 14 Comments
Azure AD Microsoft Graph API PowerShell

Creating Custom B2B Guest User Invitations with Graph API

Azure AD business-to-business guest user accounts are a terrific way to securely grant access to apps and services for external users and partner organizations. In this article, a script is introduced that can be used to automate the guest user invitation process, integrating it more seamlessly with any custom applications.

June 2, 2021

The Practical 365 Update: S2, Ep 19 – What’s new from Build 2021, and Accenture IT on Running the Largest Teams Deployment in the World

On the show this week, we're talking through the news from Build and going into detail on the most important announcements for IT pros. We're also joined by Jason Warnke and Tony Leraris from Accenture, who give us a glimpse into the fun and games around running the world's largest Microsoft Teams deployment.

May 28, 2021