Microsoft 365

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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 22 Comments

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

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
Prepopulating Outlook Contacts with the Graph API 57 Comments
Microsoft Graph

Prepopulating Outlook Contacts with the Graph API

When contacts are added to an organizations Global Address List (GAL), they do not always populate in the users personal device contacts depending on what app, device, etc. is being used. This becomes problematic when users working from outside the office are unable to contact the IT Service Desk, HR, or other internal services. To solve the problem, this article introduces a PowerShell script that will read a set of standard contacts from a CSV file and write them as personal contacts to user mailboxes. Mobile devices can then synchronize these contacts along with others created by the user.

May 20, 2021
Microsoft Extends Teams Retention Policies to All Licensed Office 365 Accounts

Microsoft Extends Teams Retention Policies to All Licensed Office 365 Accounts

Microsoft announced a bunch of changes for Microsoft 365 records management on May 19. The most interesting changes are allowing all licenses Office 365 accounts to use Teams retention policies and the advent of adaptive scopes for retention policies, both of which should be useful for many tenants. The announcement also covers multi-stage disposition reviews. If you know what that means, you'll be excited. If not, you won't.

May 20, 2021
Microsoft Updates Outlook to use Advanced Settings for Sensitivity Labels 24 Comments
Sensitivity Labels

Microsoft Updates Outlook to use Advanced Settings for Sensitivity Labels

Updates to Outlook clients (desktop, mobile, and OWA) respect the advanced settings in label policy which previously needed the deployment of the unified labeling client. Many organizations want to use mandatory labeling, but have been frustrated because of the lack of support in the Office applications. Now support is available, so it's time to label that email!

May 19, 2021