Author: Tony Redmond

Latest Articles

Creating an Exchange Online Inbound Email Traffic Report for the Last 90 Days

Exchange Online keeps message trace data online for 10 days. If you want an email traffic report covering longer periods, you need to retrieve historical message data (for up to 90 days) and report that data. That's the easy description. This article explains some of the complexities involved in generating a 90-day email traffic report for a Microsoft 365 tenant.

November 28, 2023

Microsoft Ignite 2023 Emphasizes Copilot

As is the norm for any Microsoft conference, the Microsoft Ignite 2023 announcements came thick and fast. Most of the announcements featured a heavy emphasis on some form of Copilot. Quite how useful all this AI-powered assistance will be in real life remains to be seen. Here's the Practical365 take on the important Microsoft 365 announcements at Ignite.

November 15, 2023

Practical Graph: Working with Entra ID Directory Extensions

Directory extensions allow organizations to customize the data stored for Entra ID objects such as users, groups, and devices, You need to create and manage directory extensions with PowerShell. This article explains how to do the job with cmdlets from the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK.

November 13, 2023

Building a Teams External Access Allow List from External Chats

A Teams external access whitelist controls the domains that users can connect to for federated chats. Organizations often limit federation using a whitelist to reduce the possibility of attacks through chat communications. This article explains how administrators can discover the set of domains users chat with by analyzing chat information using the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK.

November 7, 2023

Reusing User Principal Names and Primary SMTP Addresses

Microsoft 365 user accounts have user principal names (for sign in) and primary SMTP addresses (to receive email). Is it a good idea to reuse user principal names or SMTP addresses that become available when an employee leaves the organization. It might seem like a good idea, but it's really not and should be avoided. We explain why here.

October 17, 2023

Teams 2.1 Client Hits General Availability

On October 5, 2023, Microsoft announced the general availability of the new Teams 2.1 client. Based on a new architecture and promising better performance and lower system resource usage, Teams 2.1 is available for Windows and macOS desktops and browsers. The signs are good as the client has been in public preview since March, but we'll only really know how successful the client is after several months of use.

October 5, 2023