Your weekly digest for Microsoft & Office 365 News
Exchange News:
Microsoft announce OAuth support for POP3 in Exchange Online
It was only a few weeks ago that we had OAuth support for IMAP and SMTP authentication for Exchange Online, both prerequisites for those had a moved deadline of October for removing applications that use legacy authentication.
Now we’ve got another piece of the puzzle – POP3 support for OAuth in Exchange Online. Of course, applications can’t just use this – they will need to update their code to support OAuth with POP3 – most do not!
Another snippet hidden in there is that the Exchange Team refer to the service as Microsoft 365 (formally Office 365), interesting for all enterprise plan users, Office 365 E1, E3, E5 and F- plans still exist, but a sign of where things are going!
Two new troubleshooting articles on the Exchange Team Blog:
Understanding and troubleshooting Out of Office replies
If you want to learn about how the Out of Office replies work, here’s an expert to talk to: Daniel Mande from Microsoft, he created a unique blog post that’s even compelling to read for an Exchange MVP.
He’s not only providing an overview of the three types of OOF rules: Internal, External and Known Senders (Contact list), but also uses the MFCMapi tool to show you the OOF rule details in a binary way, directly in your mailbox.
Demystifying and troubleshooting hybrid mail flow – such as – “when is a message internal?”
This article provides you the nuts and bolts to support and troubleshoot mail flow between Exchange Online, your Exchange Server and vice-versa in a hybrid deployment.
The article provides detailed information and also includes two flow charts that allow you to understand the steps a message takes when passing through the systems:
- From Exchange Server (on-prem) to EXO
- From Exchange Online to Exchange Server (on-Prem)
And it provides reference to relevant Logs that can help in mail flow troubleshooting:
- Message tracking, Connectors Verbose Protocol Logs or Transport pipline tracing for Exchange Server
- A Message Trace Extended Report for Exchange Online
And on Practical 365 – a timeless reminder that you don’t need a “Hybrid Server” to do Hybrid…
You may know already that Exchange 2010 and above come with Hybrid built in but it’s still common for people to add additional servers to support Hybrid.
This new article on Practical 365 explains why you don’t need one.
In SharePoint there are a couple of useful new capabilities launching this week:
Migration Manager enters general availability and the SharePoint Migration Tool adds Microsoft Teams support
Exciting news in SharePoint this week as the Migration Manager hits general availability. This tooling is designed for organizations that are looking to coordinate the migration of file-based data, in particular to Microsoft 365.
The SharePoint Migration Tool also gets support for Teams. This is, by the looks of it, a SharePoint integration of sorts – as it’s aimed at letting you select the Teams channel as a target, aligning the SharePoint file-migration to your design and structure for Teams.
You can create a SharePoint List from Microsoft Excel
We talked about Microsoft Lists last week, but SharePoint Lists are still important. One thing people struggle with is starting a list in a tool like Excel and then porting it over to a SharePoint List where it might better live. The new functionality in Excel, launched yesterday, makes it easy to take a workbook and import it into SharePoint as a list.
In Teams news this week, there are a few interesting features going live:
Teams Contact Center Support
Teams doesn’t have a built-in contact center system. These are traditionally built and sold by third-party companies, integrating into various phone systems. The new, long-awaited contact center support for Teams allows these vendors to integrate their systems into Teams natively through new APIs.
Details of these, and the supportive vendors are listed here.
May update for Microsoft Teams Rooms
Teams Rooms gets a number of new updates – as it does on a monthly basis. This month we’ve got a few new interesting features including Modern Authentication support, and UI changes such as the new bootloader screen.
In the podcast, we discuss how important Teams Rooms are likely to be, as offices around the world go back (in part) to the office. A Teams Room, with touch-free features like proximity-join, makes it simple to stay in touch with workers who are still working from home.
Planner expands it’s capabilities in Teams
One feature Sigi doesn’t like in Planner is the ability to directly attach a file – which is not so good for documents as the are better stored within SharePoint or OneDrive. But there is a place for attaching things like images to better illustrate a task. This wasn’t possible if you are using Planner in Teams – you’d have to go into the web UI. It’s now fixed.
And one notable feature, though it’s a little fun – is when you complete tasks you will be showered in confetti. This is just on the screen though – no tidying up needed, unless of course, you want to get someone to throw some over you – if you do, you’ll have to arrange that separately.
Interesting announcements on the Roadmap
- New groups management features to be available in the Microsoft 365 admin center
- The Microsoft 365 admin center functionality for groups management has been a little lacking – though you can manage it entirely using PowerShell, of course.
- New functionality is apparently rolling out now adding Teams creation, editing of group email address, better sorting capabilities and restoration of deleted groups.
- Availability date: May CY2020
- Pinned posts for Microsoft Teams
- An interesting feature, especially if you are defining structure for your Teams, or want to pin important information at the top of company-wide teams, is coming.
- Starting sometime next month you will be able to pin messages within Channels so that they will always be available, in the channel information pane.
- Availability date: June CY2020
- Live caption, new meeting join experience and new channel meeting experience coming to GCC (US Government) tenants
- A host of existing functionality comes to the GCC environment first, live captions comes in June.
- However you’ll need to wait a little longer for the new meeting join experience and channel meeting experience which comes in Q4 2020.
- Management of the “What’s new” in Office coming for admins
- If you are rolling out Office updates but want to control when you soft-launch or train users, then you’ll find this new functionality useful.
- This allows you to select which functionality will be shown in the ‘what’s new’ pop-up boxes that show in the Office apps.
