Author: Tony Redmond

Latest Articles

Microsoft Updates Viva Insights App with Wellbeing Features

Microsoft Updates Viva Insights App with Wellbeing Features

A new version of the Microsoft Viva Insights app for Teams includes some of the promised wellbeing functionality designed to help stressed users get through the work day more easily. You can praise co-workers, learn to breathe and relax, note your current state of wellness, and take a virtual commute to wrap up the working day. Some people will love the app, others will wonder what the fuss is all about. It's a very personal thing, which I guess is the nature of Viva Insights.

May 14, 2021
New-DistributionGroup: A PowerShell Cmdlet Which Gets No Respect 9 Comments
Powershell New-DistributionGroup

New-DistributionGroup: A PowerShell Cmdlet Which Gets No Respect

The New-DistributionGroup cmdlet has been in Exchange since 2006. It creates a new distribution list that is easily populated with a few commands. Although Microsoft might like everyone to use the new-fangled Microsoft 365 Groups, the fact remains that distribution lists are very useful. So much so that many millions are still in active use. In this article, we explore how to create new standard and dynamic distribution lists with PowerShell.

May 12, 2021
Microsoft’s Plan to Create EU Data Boundary for Cloud Services by the End of 2022 2 Comments

Microsoft’s Plan to Create EU Data Boundary for Cloud Services by the End of 2022

Microsoft posted details of its EU Data Boundary plan on May 6 to cover the storage and processing of personal and commercial data used by Microsoft cloud services. The plan is due to be achieved by the end of 2022 and Microsoft says that they have considered the engineering and technical challenges. A quick look at a European Office 365 tenant reveals that many services run in the U.S., so there's lots of work to do.

May 6, 2021
How to Monitor Changes to Sensitivity Labels Used for Container Management 10 Comments

How to Monitor Changes to Sensitivity Labels Used for Container Management

Sensitivity labels are an effective way to manage containers like Teams, Microsoft 365 Groups, and SharePoint sites. Microsoft doesn't provide any way to track changes made to labels assigned to containers, which means that a group owner can downgrade the policy assigned through a label. This article explains a method to detect when label changes occur for containers and how to revert those changes if necessary.

May 4, 2021
Microsoft Replaces Office Graph Controls with Microsoft Graph Privacy Controls 12 Comments

Microsoft Replaces Office Graph Controls with Microsoft Graph Privacy Controls

The Office Graph powers Microsoft 365 applications like Delve. Six years after Delve's introduction, its privacy controls are being replaced by Microsoft Graph tenant settings from May 15, 2021. The changeover is important if your Office 365 tenant includes some people who have excluded themselves from document insights. You should take action to replace the old Office Delve controls with the Microsoft Graph privacy controls.

April 28, 2021
Microsoft Patches Four More Exchange Server Vulnerabilities as the FBI Moves to Clean Infected Servers 2 Comments

Microsoft Patches Four More Exchange Server Vulnerabilities as the FBI Moves to Clean Infected Servers

Microsoft has released security patches to address four new remote code vulnerabilities in Exchange 2013,2016, and 2019. At the same time, the FBI has removed web shells from compromised servers, but only in the U.S. Now more than ever it is essential that Exchange Server administrators apply all available patches and make sure that their servers have no lingering surprises left behind by attackers.

April 15, 2021
Exchange Online Launches Expiring Domain Insight (and Causes a Little Confusion) 7 Comments

Exchange Online Launches Expiring Domain Insight (and Causes a Little Confusion)

Exchange Online has a new domain expiring soon alert, which means that a mail flow insight checks for soon-to-expire domains in the set of accepted domains for a tenant. When the insight detects a domain due to expire within 90, 60, and 30-day windows, it sends a high-severity alert to the tenant administrators to tell them that they should renew the domain(s).

April 14, 2021
Teams Meetings Get Webinar Capability 48 Comments
Microsoft Teams Webinar

Teams Meetings Get Webinar Capability

Anyone who can run a Microsoft Teams meeting can now run a webinar using a modified version of a standard Teams meeting. Microsoft is quite clever in extending the standard functionality to be able to deliver the features needed to publish and deliver a webinar. Some rough edges exist, but because running a webinar is very like running a regular meeting, you can expect that this will be an extremely popular new feature.

April 12, 2021
Azure’s DNS Problem Highlights Fallibility in Cloud Services One comment

Azure’s DNS Problem Highlights Fallibility in Cloud Services

Microsoft experienced a failure with its Azure DNS servers on April 1. The issue was quickly resolved and the root cause determined to be a bug. That's all good, but Azure has suffered several recent problems which have affected other Microsoft cloud services from Office 365 to Bing to Xbox. Microsoft says they are taking action to remove the single point of failures in their infrastructure. Let's hope that they get the work done before the Microsoft cloud suffers a more widespread outage.

April 9, 2021