The Practical 365 Weekly Update: Ep 1 – Exchange Updates and Roadmap

In the all-new episode of The Practical 365 Podcast, Chief Editor’s and MVPs Steve Goodman and Sigi Jagott get together to discuss what’s new in Microsoft 365 this week. Whether it’s big announcements, latest Message Center news or what’s cropped up on the Microsoft 365 roadmap.

With Microsoft Ignite 2019 just behind us, the announcements have begun to peter out ever so slightly. If you watched some of our videos from the event, you’ll have a taster of the many announcements from the week.

Exchange Announcements

So, what are the new features coming to Exchange Online that we are excited about?

Firstly, Exchange Online Email Enhancements for End Users are on there way. This means we can expect Support for Plus Addressing, for example, Sigi+Practical365@contoso.com. You can now also send it from a proxy address alias. Also, we can expect Message Recall in Exchange Online which will be agent-based and not Outlook based. The main benefit of this is you can recall any message, not connected to any client. For example, mobile clients cannot recall messages currently. The only limitation here is that you won’t be able to recall messages from another tenant. Also, users will now have a ‘Reply-All Storm Protection’.

Admins can also expect some new email enhancements. Keep your eyes peeled for the Modern Exchange Admin Center (EAC) Portal. Here you can expect some new and improved reporting, improvements to the migration experience, new engine for the Google G-Suite mail migration and a new Exchange Admin Center.

The new Exchange Admin Center has a ‘sneak preview’ which is available now! You can test it out on “admin.exchange.microsoft.com –“. The public preview will be announced for H1 in 2020, and here we should get some inclination on when it’ll be GA.

Another exciting Exchange announcement is the EXO PowerShell V2 Client Module, which will have new Exchange Online Powershell cmdlets, there is currently a preview available. You can expect improvements cmdlet by cmdlet, you can identify them by the added ‘ExO’ included in the cmdlet, for example, Get-ExoMailbox, Get-.

What’s great about this new addition is it’s up to 8x faster than common Exchange cmdlets. It’s also stateless meaning it has no affinity to the server and connects to the next available BE in the event of disconnect.

You can also get Pagination Support for this function, so you can retry and resume from the point of the most recent failure. In addition, Microsoft have also improved the data size in this area, using a mindset for enhanced performance and reduced object conversion time in the REST API Direct invoke of business logic to avoid PowerShell layer and its latencies and optimized AD queries. The throttling has also had a vast development here with improved logic to provide better reliability when carrying out tasks.

Another exciting Exchange announcement this week is that Customizable Recipient Limits have been increased. So currently you can have 500 per recipient, however in the future, you will be able to 1-1000 per recipient and a default limit will be available, just at the recipient mail size.

Last but most definitely not least, a preview for tenant-to-tenant migrations for Exchange Online is coming soon. Cross-tenant mailbox migration public preview is planned to be launched in H1 2020. If you’re preparing for this yourself, we recommend to check out the Microsoft documentation here. Alternatively, Steve Goodman has written a step-by-step guide on How to Migrate Exchange to Office 365.

Message Centre Updates

Exchange wasn’t the only area of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem to serve us up some prominent updates. There have also been some top announcements in the Message Centre.

To summarize, you can now prevent self-service purchases for Power Platform licensing. You can also move to using the Edge for the protected Intune Browser rather than the Intune Managed Browser, check out more information on this here.

There are a few new features coming to Teams which we can look forward to. A new feature coming to Teams in December will allow us to welcome a new colleague into Teams, you can check out the Roadmap link here. Another feature that is currently in development is Sensitivity Labels in Teams, so you can regulate who can access teams in your organization, which will be created in the security and compliance admin center. There will be new tags available in December, which means you can tag people with a specific job role in posts, for example, all IT Admins.

Microsoft has announced they have updated PowerApps integration with SharePoint libraries, you can find out more information here.

What’s new on the roadmap?

Launches 

• Teams for Linux Client (56219) 
• Outlook for Android: S/MIME (32569) 

Rolling Out 

• Outlook for iOS: Do Not Disturb settings (45917)  
• Outlook for Android: Report spam and phishing messages (53117)  
• Outlook for iOS: Propose a new time to meet and accept it (53997 and 53996)  
• Outlook for iOS: Meeting Insights – Emails and documents that are relevant to your meeting or appointment are included in the Calendar event description (56327)  

In Development 

• ToDo Enhancements – 56873 and 56875 – Share To on iOS – and drag and drop in Android split view  
• Microsoft 365 Usage Analytics Power BI Application – Replaces Content Pack 58080  
• FindTime now stores data in the user’s mailbox – 58210 – avoid NA data storage and use the organizer’s mailbox  
• Outlook on the web – Suggested locations (56795) 

Stay tuned for our next Podcast on Friday 29^th November.