ESPC 2023 Starts Today

Monday sees the opening of the European SharePoint Conference or rather the European SharePoint, Office 365, and Azure conference (ESPC 2023). All-day tutorials take place on Monday and the event kicks into the usual conference format of keynotes and breakout sessions on Tuesday. Everything takes place at the RAI center in Amsterdam. I like ESPC because its schedule includes a high percentage of sessions given by independent experts alongside those delivered by representatives of Microsoft’s marketing muscle, all scripted to the last sentence.

Following the lead set by last week’s Ignite 2023 conference, there’s no doubt that Microsoft will make Copilot center stage. We’ll hear about the wonders of digital assistants and what generative AI can do when linked to Microsoft 365 and the Microsoft Graph, all delivered with lashings of hyperbole and copious portions of breathless elation.

I see that there’s also a lot of Teams and Viva content but there’s a conspicuous lack of sessions covering Entra ID and Exchange Online, both of which are fundamental to the success of any Microsoft 365 deployment. Given Microsoft’s focus on using conditional access policies to enforce multi-factor authentication and other controls, the session covering this topic should be well worthwhile.

I guess even the ESPC content team is attracted by the shiny new stuff to the detriment of the really important underpinnings that everything is built upon. Then again, if potential speakers don’t propose sessions, they can’t be chosen.

Making Generative AI Work for Microsoft 365

I’ll be throwing my hat into the ring by talking about Making generative AI work for Microsoft 365 at 16:45 on Tuesday (session T48). I’ve given this session a couple of times before, notably at The Experts Conference (TEC) in Atlanta and learn a lot each time I talk about this topic, largely through the questions asked by audience members or contributions from people who’ve been exposed to Copilot for Microsoft 365.

Given that Microsoft currently requires Copilot for Microsoft 365 deployments to purchase a minimum of 300 licenses, I can’t run Copilot for Microsoft 365 in my own tenant. So far, I’ve been limited to the experience gained from other tenants that ran Copilot in the limited preview. That’s a pity because you obviously can learn a lot more when poking around behind the scenes to discover stuff that’s not documented (or not well documented). Nevertheless, I’ve picked up a lot about how Microsoft 365 Copilot works outside the carefully curated environment of a Microsoft demo, and that’s what I want to discuss during the session. I can only promise that the talk will be hype-free, grounded in reality, and focused on practicality. I’ll try not to swear too much.

I’ve written about topics like how Microsoft uses Copilot to force customers to upgrade, the real costs of deploying Copilot for Microsoft 365, the joys of deciding who within an organization should get Copilot licenses, and the lessons that we can learn from Bing Chat Enterprise (now renamed as just Copilot). Hopefully, I present a hardnosed practical view of the value Copilot for Microsoft 365 can deliver and the work organizations need to do to extract that value.

Meeting People at ESPC 2023

But good conferences are not all about sessions. What I like about ESPC is the ability to catch up with many interesting people from across the Microsoft 365 technical community, including some of the author team for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. I look forward to bumping into people like Ståle Hansen, Andy Malone, and Aleksandar Nikolic, and I might even be nice to Microsoft’s Fabian Williams when we chat about some of the inconsistencies afflicting the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK.

I’m sure that Paul Robichaux and his KeepIt colleagues will have some interesting views to share about the recent announcement that Microsoft 365 Backup is heading for public preview next month. ISVS can choose to adopt Microsoft’s APIs and keep all data within Microsoft datacenters or use their own technology to move data to external repositories. There are many interesting points to discuss around that choice.

I also look forward to catching up with Szymon Szczesniak and the rest of the CodeTwo Software team. CodeTwo sponsor the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook and make sure that we can deliver the book at a reasonable cost. Szymon and I will have a public discussion about anything to do with Microsoft 365 at the CodeTwo booth in the exhibition hall after I get through with my session on Tuesday evening. Come along and join the conversation!

Fun and Games at ESPC 2023

Apart from the formal sessions, exhibition hall, and meet-ups, a lot of valuable discussion will take place at ESPC 2023 after hours events (official and unofficial). I shall remember to stay well away from the CloudWay contingent after what they did to my liver at ESPC last year. Seriously, a good conference has a good mixture, and the ESPC organizers do an excellent job of making sure that everyone has a good time. I’m looking forward to the event, even if the PowerPoint template for the event features a rather creepy picture of Jeff Teper. Keep an eye out and see if you agree.

Success of PowerShell Based on Community Values

The success of PowerShell is firmly rooted in strong community involvement and the willingness of people to share their knowledge about how to get things done. This has been the case for as long as I have worked with PowerShell (starting with Exchange 2007 in late 2006). I learned from many and gradually moved from total novice status to become mildly competent. Some would say dangerously incompetent, but that’s another discussion.

Part of being in a community is acknowledgement of the work you reuse from others. If you find some useful code in a script written by someone else, incorporate the code into your script and include an acknowledgement of where the code came from. It’s simply being polite.

Reporting Room Mailbox Statistics

Which brings me to a post from the Office 365 Reports company on May 23 about reporting room mailbox statistics (Figure 1). This is an area that I know well. I covered it in a Practical365.com article in December 2022 and revised my script to add extra reporting capabilities in February 2023 following reader feedback for the original article.

Seeing the post in the Facebook PowerShell group, I opened the link to read the article to discover that much of the code in the script was lifted from my script posted in GitHub. No attempt was made to hide the source of many lines of code, which was copied and dropped into the Office 365 Reports script. Even the most cursory of examinations reveals the extent of the copying.

It’s true that the Office 365 Reports version uses the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK where I use an Azure AD registered app as the source of authentication to access the data held in room mailbox calendars, but look beyond that to the output and you’ll see where the copying happened. Figure 2 shows a screen shot published in my February 2023 article. Look at the summary for individual room mailbox statistics. Doesn’t that look very similar to the output generated by the Office 365 Reports version?

Any PowerShell script might produce rudimentary output that looks similar to other scripts. But if you examine their script, you’ll find many matches with the original code. In short, Office 365 Reports were lazy and copied code without bothering to hide their traces.

Poor Behavior From a Commercial Company

I have a real problem with this behavior. First, no one from Office 365 Reports (or AdminDroid, their associated company) contacted me to ask if they could reuse my code.  Instead, Office 365 Reports went ahead and copied many lines of code (including a bug that I subsequently fixed) from GitHub and published their script. They didn’t bother responding to the comment I made to their Facebook post either.

Second, they didn’t bother to acknowledge the original source of much of the code in their script. I did not grant Office 365 Reports the right to reuse my code for commercial purposes, which is what they have done by including the code in a script developed to attract interest in Office 365 Reports and AdminDroid.

Plagiarism is Never Justified

I don’t like slamming companies in public, but I hate when companies like AdminDroid seek to benefit from the work shared freely within the PowerShell community. My suspicion is that this is not the first time that Office 365 Reports and AdminDroid have “borrowed” code from the PowerShell community to advance their commercial interests. I also don’t like the way that they post articles under assumed names like Kathy Cooper. I don’t believe that such a person exists. It’s just a nom de plume used to disguise whoever writes the articles.

If the people behind AdminDroid and Office 365 Reports want to contact me, I’m happy to hear their side of the argument. But right now this looks like a simple case of plagiarism. If that’s the way AdminDroid operates, why would anyone use their products?

It’s Good to Have the Microsoft Exchange Conference Back

Twenty-six years ago, I attended the Microsoft Exchange Deployment Conference in Austin, Texas. I brought copies of Microsoft Exchange Server: Planning, Design, and Implementation, the book I’d written about Exchange 4.0 (Figure 1).

The book had been put together quite quickly based on experience of the beta version of Exchange 4.0 and some exposure to the final version released to customers. The conference was a great chance to glean some extra knowledge about Exchange and fill the gaps in the book. I don’t pretend that the 4.0 book was perfect, a fact that the then Exchange product manager Elaine Sharpe expressed to me rather forcefully. Elaine and I made up and she wrote the foreword to my Exchange 5.0 book.

Presenting at MEC

A year later, I presented at the first Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC) in San Diego, California. Compared to other MEC events, I have no real memories of that conference, but it began a relationship with MEC that’s lasted 25 years. MEC 1998 in Boston evokes strong memories of competition with Lotus Notes and some wild parties. I presented a keynote at MEC 2000 in Dallas (Figure 2) when Windows 2000, Exchange 2000, and Active Directory were the new kids on the block. It was a blast to speak to 8,000 people, even if I couldn’t see past the front row.

Flat Tony

After a hiatus caused by Microsoft marketing dictats and an unfortunate focus on TechEd, Microsoft brought MEC back in 2012. The early days of Office 365 meant that MEC 2012 featured many discussions about mailbox migrations to the cloud. Two years later, the last MEC (in Austin), brought Flat Tony to the scene. Microsoft asked me for copies of all the books I had written about Exchange Server for a display at the conference. Microsoft embellished the display with a cardboard cut-out figure created by placing a photo of my head on top of a body from someone in significantly better shape (Figure 3).

Flat Tony survived MEC and the Exchange development group then took the figure on tour through bars in Austin. Eventually, the figure reached Redmond and subsequently turned up at a couple of MVP summits before meeting its end in Greg Taylor’s wood. Good times!

Sessions at MEC 2022

This week, I will present two sessions at MEC 2022, now renamed the Microsoft Exchange Community Airlift. MECA is a horrible acronym, so MEC will do. My sessions are:

• An administrator’s guide to the Microsoft 365 substrate (September 13, 10AM Pacific).
• Master the Graph for Exchange PowerShell (September 14, 11AM Pacific).

All sessions are run as Teams meetings and recordings will be available on the MEC website afterward.

In-Person Events are Even Better

Happy as I am to present at MEC 2022, I will be even more pleased to travel to Atlanta to attend The Experts Conference (TEC) on September 20-21. There’s nothing quite like an in-person event to get the creative juices going. TEC is close to being sold out, but I think some tickets might still be available.

TEC is a small event that’s quite unlike the large-scale Microsoft events in terms of access to speakers and subject matter experts. It should be a fun gathering. In particular, I’m looking forward to hearing from Alex Weinert, who always reveals some solid data about the current security landscape. His session at the RSA 2020 conference captured the reasons why basic authentication is so bad for email connection protocols. Speaking of which, Greg Taylor will be at TEC to tell people about the progress Microsoft is making in turning off basic authentication for Exchange Online. That should be a fun session. Meantime, I’ll talk about the challenge of mastering the many technologies that make up Microsoft 365. I might not have a perfect answer, but I have some views on the topic.

Conferences Restarting

It seems like conferences are returning to some level of normality, which is nice. After MEC and TEC, the next conference on my list is the European SharePoint, Office 365, and Azure Conference in Copenhagen (November 28-December 1) where I’ll discuss how to manage Teams for success. At least, that’s what the session title says.

I plan not to attend Microsoft Ignite. I can’t get excited about an event that’s succumbed to the same marketing disease that afflicted TechEd. At least MEC allows independent experts to give their view about Microsoft technology, something that’s become much more difficult to do at Ignite because of the lack of speaking opportunities Microsoft makes available to non-Microsoft speakers. While Ignite remains on its current course, it’s just not attractive to me. But at least I have MEC and TEC to look forward to. Rumors exist that MEC 2023 will be an in-person event. That’s something even more pleasant to contemplate.

Keep up with the changing world of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem by subscribing to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. Monthly updates mean that our subscribers learn about new developments as they happen.

First In-Person Event Since 2019

The last in-person event I spoke at was the European SharePoint Conference in Prague in December 2019. Much has happened since, but as society gradually recovers from the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, conferences are beginning to cast off the constraints imposed by having to run as virtual gatherings. Don’t get me wrong. Virtual conferences filled a gap while travel was impossible or restricted, but the energy, vitality, and enthusiasm present when gathering to listen to a series of sessions delivered by Microsoft Teams or Zoom is very different to an in-person event.

All of which means that I am looking forward to being in Dusseldorf, Germany for the European Collaboration Summit (ECS) starting on November 29. ECS runs alongside its sister event, the European Cloud Summit. Both events are being run under strict Covid-19 protocols to protect all those involved.

ECS is a community event which isn’t run purely on a commercial basis (costs must be covered, so the event is sponsored). The result is that the ECS vibe is quite different. Because it’s a community event, ECS sessions deliver more independent and diverse thought about how technology works and how to extract value from deployments. Compared to the blandness of a Microsoft event like Ignite, the level of marketing hyperbole, overpromising, and under delivery is far less.

Although I enjoy seeing the range of expertise available in most ECS sessions, I consider it regrettable that all the ECS keynote sessions feature Microsoft employees. This is no criticism of the Microsoft speakers, most of whom I know well. Instead, it’s a desire for conferences to surface diverse leadership opinions instead of automatically assuming that the only source of inspiration and knowledge comes from those with a Microsoft badge. There’s surely some independent thinking available in the Microsoft collaboration community suitable for a keynote to replace and counterbalance the sameness of the messages delivered by Microsoft at conferences around the globe. Remember, if we all believed the marketing bluster received from Microsoft in the past, everyone would be communicating by Yammer instead of using email and Teams.

My Schedule

ECS begins with a day of workshops on Monday with sessions delivered over the following two days. I’ll cover All About Microsoft 365 Sensitivity Labels at 14:45 on Tuesday, 30 November in Room 1 (Aurum room) while fellow Office 365 for IT Pros author and MVP Paul Robichaux will present on Email is the Easy Part: 5 Pitfalls to Avoid in Tenant-to-Tenant Migrations at 15:00 on Wednesday, 1 December at the Teams Stage.

I’ve covered the development of sensitivity labels and their spreading influence within Microsoft 365 since the debut of the technology. Recent articles include:

• How Sensitivity Labels can control the external sharing capability for SharePoint Online Sites.
• How to Decrypt SharePoint Online Documents using PowerShell and the Graph API
• How to use Sensitivity Labels to protect Teams meeting recordings.
• Synchronizing Sensitivity Labels from Microsoft 365 Groups to Update SharePoint Online Sites.
• How to Report the Audit Events Generated by Sensitivity Labels.
• Power BI Support for Sensitivity Labels.
• Using Advanced Settings for Sensitivity Labels with Outlook.
• How to Monitor Changes in the Sensitivity Labels Applied to Sites, Teams, and Groups.

Hopefully, I will have some new information to share with attendees. That’s the plan, but like most plans, it will go out the window once the first slide hits the screen. We’ll see how things evolve based on audience participation, questions, and whatever comes into my head at the time.

Here’s a downloadable copy of my presentation (not protected by a sensitivity label)

Regretfully, I won’t be at ECS on Wednesday. Other commitments bring me back to Dublin on Wednesday morning. However, there’s a bunch of good sessions scheduled for day 2 of ECS, so I suspect I’ll be one of the few leaving early.

Learn about protecting Office 365 content by subscribing to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. Use our experience to understand what’s importance and how best to protect your tenant. We have a full chapter explaining all you need to know about Information protection.

Videos and Slides Available to All

The Experts Conference (TEC) 2021 took place using a mixture of Teams Live Events and online meetings over September 1-2. The TEC organizers have posted videos and slides of the presentations online for all to access.

Naturally, you’ll check out my session on Leveraging the Graph to Manage Microsoft 365 (video and slides). While many of the topics covered in the session have also appeared in articles, there’s nothing like making a pitch on important topics like this to force you to think through the value of the subject.

Many other useful sessions are also available – certainly enough for anyone to find some nuggets of information. I’ve pointed to a set of sessions that I like here, including interesting talks about the Microsoft 365 substrate, Azure AD futures, and defending your company against sophisticated cyberattacks.

Looking Forward to TEC 2022 in Atlanta

The Experts Conference 2022 takes place September 20-21, 2022, in the Loews Atlanta Hotel. Although Teams has served as a worthy platform for TEC 2020 and TEC 2021, it will be great to get back to an in-person conference. Many great speakers have already been lined up, and the combination of talent and in-person interaction should make TEC 2022 a fantastic event to attend. Super early bird registration for TEC 2022 ends Feb 28, 2022, and costs $350. The registration gradually increases to $799, so this is a good example of getting in early to save money.

I look forward to meeting many Office 365 for IT Pros subscribers at TEC 2021 in Atlanta.

The news that Quest Software has bought Quadrotech Solutions AG broke today. As the (now-ex) chairman of the Quadrotech board, you can say that I was a little invested in the project. It’s nice to see it complete as I think that the two Q’s are a good match. Both, for instance, showed immaculate taste by sponsoring the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. We thank Quest for their sponsorship of the 2021 edition, which allows the writing team to spend more hours investigating, probing, understanding, and eventually writing about Office 365.

ISVs and the Microsoft 365 Ecosystem

A healthy ISV community is important for an ecosystem like Microsoft 365. Microsoft grew large Exchange and SharePoint on-premises businesses thanks in no small part to the way that ISV filled functionality gaps.

It’s more difficult inside Office 365 because many of the techniques ISVs can use with on-premises servers are unavailable. It’s becomes even more challenging when Microsoft ships new features on what seems like an almost daily basis.

I still think that ISVs have a future in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. It’s harder to find the gaps to fill, but ISVs do take on challenges that Microsoft doesn’t want to invest in because of complexity, potential support cost, or it’s not aligned with their business goals.

Great Technology Solves Problems

Tenant to tenant migration is a good example. It’s never going to be a cookie-cutter solution because every company is different and the task of combining or splitting organizations varies based on their business needs, regulatory environment, and timing. Microsoft is working in this space, but I consider their vision to be very limited. I doubt that any solution engineered to move data from one Office 365 tenant to another can process everything automatically: there are just too many moving parts across Azure Active Directory, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Teams, and Stream to make everything fall into place at the touch of a button.

But that doesn’t mean that you can’t innovate to solve individual aspects of the overall challenge, and work hard over time to bring meaningful automation to the table. When I look at the transformational technology Quest now has from its acquisitions of Metalogix, Quadrotech, and Binary Tree, I think great strides can be made in tenant-to-tenant automation, especially when driven by some of the people I know to work in this area.

More ISV Consolidation to Come

I expect more consolidation to happen within Office 365 ISVs. Scale matters, especially to protect cash flow at a time when the pandemic created some unique (and tight) business conditions, and investment is needed to drive new technology forward. Quadrotech could have survived on its own, but it will do much better as part of the Quest Platform Management group.

The Experts Conference

Speaking of Quest, their The Experts Conference (TEC) takes place (virtually) next week (November 17-18). There’s still time to register to listen to a great lineup of speakers, including my session about sensitivity labels (I know, thrilling!). Quest even had me make a video to explain why I think TEC is such a great event.

An Author’s Perspective

Working on large book projects is something I’ve had occasion to do a lot over the last 25 or so years (yikes!) The Office 365 for IT Pros book is unique not only because it gets monthly updates, but also because of the way we do annual revisions.

Here’s how the sausage gets made.

Scheduling Progress

First, let’s talk about the schedule. We release each year’s edition at the beginning of July. That’s a hard deadline that we’ve all agreed to. So starting in March-ish, we meet as an editorial team to decide whether we need any structural changes to the whole book. This usually results in some good-natured argument because even with a 1200+ page book we can’t cover everything that Microsoft does. We have to choose what to include and what to skip. In past years, we’ve had these discussions at the MVP Summit in Redmond. Unfortunately, you all know why that wasn’t possible this year!

When Microsoft adds a major new workload or feature, that’s a good candidate for inclusion. If they deprecate or replace something, that’s a good candidate for a drop. But sometimes we have to make judgment calls. For example, the Exchange ActiveSync coverage from the clients chapters was relegated to the 2021 companion volume because in a world that has Intune and M365 MDM, it’s just not that important any more. We went through a similar process when Exchange Unified Messaging died its sad and undeserved death.

Multiple Author Perspectives

Where things get interesting is that each author has a unique perspective on which parts of Microsoft 365 are most important, yet we’re all battling to keep the book to a reasonable size for readers. I might argue for adding or removing coverage in someone else’s chapter, and vice versa, and all those arguments have to be managed. Tony is a firm but fair arbiter when we disagree over how much coverage to give any particular topic.

(side note: of course, since the book is really a two-volume book, and purchasers get both together, we get to keep interesting or useful material that’s not quite ready to be cut without adding unwanted bulk to the main book– something impossible to do with dead-tree books.)

Oh, yes– we also choose a title and a cover photo. But you’ll have to wait to see those, I think…. we have to keep some surprises.

Working on Chapters

So.. after we make the team decision on how the book should be structured, each of us goes off to work on the individual chapters we own. Each author has a free hand to decide what topics to cover in their chapters and how they’re structured. We work together to ensure smooth coverage; for example, in the clients chapter I talk about the importance of split tunnels for VPN connectivity, and Stale’s coverage of split tunneling builds on mine to flesh out more details in his chapters on Teams.

One of the big parts of the annual revision is improving the organization and structure. For example, the clients chapter for 2021 is completely restructured top-to-bottom, and the Intune chapter is too, to make them easier to read and more clear—and also to make it easier to add new content in the future. Because we update the text monthly, we often say things like “In November 2019, Microsoft changed the XYZ feature to accept Twinkies as payment” so that readers will notice the latest changes. By the following summer, that reference a) probably seems dated and b) is probably wrong because Microsoft changed things four more times since the original version. The annual refresh is a good time for us to clean up outdated dates and refresh the text to keep it relevant and technically correct.

The Goodness of a Technical Edit

Once each refreshed chapter is done (including new screenshots, line art, PowerShell code samples, and so on), it goes to our technical editor, Vasil Michev.

Vasil is too smart to waste time on Twitter, so he may not see me say this, but he has maybe the most critical job in the whole book: looking for errors, omissions, or problems with the text as written. Of course, each author is ultimately responsible for their own mistakes but Vasil does a superb job of finding small, and occasionally large, problems so we can fix them before print.

After the tech edit pass, the author gets the chapter back with embedded comments, which we then have to handle by fixing mistakes or typos, clarifying things, and so on. This is no different than any document editing you may ever have done. Depending on the size of the changes, this may be a simple matter of fixing a few typos or writing a chunk of new material to ensure coverage of something important.

At that point, the chapter is “done”. I put “done” in quotes because Microsoft is always changing the service, and just because we think the chapter is done at any point in time doesn’t mean that we can ignore Microsoft updates. It’s common for us to be making last-minute changes up until the day of the book’s release, although we try not to overdo it because of the overhead involved in building the complete book each time a chapter changes.

Tools We Use

As you might expect, we use the tools we write about– we use Teams as our operating environment, Planner to track task assignments, and so on. In fact, nearly the only parts of the book’s production and workflow that don’t depend on Microsoft are this blog (powered by WordPress) and our storefront, powered by Gumroad. This process is complicated a little by the fact that many of us are using pre-production releases of various Microsoft services, so we run into bugs, incomplete features, and so on more than you’d expect in a typical deployment… but that’s all part of testing and learning the service well enough to be able to write about it.

Towards the 2021 Edition

I’m excited about the 2021 edition, and we have a lot of interesting and useful new material in this edition. Just in my own chapters, here’s a partial list: better coverage of the Office Client Policy service, coverage of split tunneling for VPNs, more depth on how to manage Microsoft 365 using Endpoint Manager, an introduction to Azure Cloud Shell, a brand-new chapter on adoption, and coverage of the new Exchange PowerShell v2 cmdlets). To help you get the best possible value, we’re running a special promotion: buy the 2020 edition now and you’ll get the 2021 edition at no extra cost. As always, we’re looking out for previous buyers too– if you already bought the 2020 edition, we’ll be offering a solid discount on purchase of the upgrade to 2021.

We appreciate the support we have had from our subscribers and hope that you will continue that support with Office 365 for IT Pros 2021 edition!

Paul Robichaux and I taped an episode of our Office 365 Exposed podcast on Thursday, April 2 at 20:00 GMT/15:00 EST/20:00 UTC. We discussed recent news about Office 365, which could lead us anywhere. Clearly there’s lots to talk about with all the recent happenings, including Microsoft’s decision to make the Ignite 2019 a virtual event.

Podcast Now Online

Update (April 6): We used a Teams meeting and to invite anyone who wanted to come along to listen to the show and maybe even ask some questions. Things worked out pretty well and the podcast is now online with your favorite podcast app (here’s the link to iTunes). Paul’s note about the recording, including the audio file, is available here.

We promised nothing except the benefit of our wisdom. Some of which is in the podcast. Enjoy!

Videoed for Your Viewing Pleasure

Lots of new announcements were made by Microsoft and other vendors at the Microsoft Ignite 2019 conference in Orlando last week. The nice people from Quadrotech, who sponsor the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook, asked me to tape a short video for each of the first four days at the Microsoft Ignite 2019 conference. The basic idea was to chat about interesting news that I had learned from attending keynotes or other sessions. They’ve put the videos together into a YouTube playlist.

The videos covered:

• Office 365, Exchange Online, and Outlook news.
• All about the Office 365 substrate and why it makes sense to look at Office 365 through the lens of an operating system (according to Jeffrey Snover).
• What’s happening in Microsoft Stream, including a new AI-powered ability to suppress background noise and how Stream is going to embrace Office 365 Data Governance functionality.
• Why the new common sharing control introduced by OneDrive and surfaced across multiple Office 365 applications makes a heap of sense and makes a switch to “cloudy attachments” much more feasible.

Enjoy the videos!

Finishing Microsoft Ignite 2019 With Another Teams Session

One of the unique joys for all conference presenters is waiting for an audience to assemble. Will anyone turn up? Will only a few be waiting for me to start? Will people leave during the session? Will they like my material? I must admit to having some of these doubts at conferences where I have presented.

My last session at Microsoft Ignite 2019 was scheduled for Friday morning, the day after the attendee party at Universal Studios. The party ended at midnight and it takes time for people to get back to their hotels, so asking them to be at a 9:15am session on the last day of the conference is a stretch for some. And when I walked into the room about 30 minutes before the session started, rows of empty seats were waiting to be filled (Figure 1).

I wasn’t quite sure about the maximum capacity, but it was certainly in the high hundreds or early thousands. You can’t see past the front row once things start because of the very bright lights on the stage that are needed to record the video, so it wasn’t possible to know exactly how many turned up. Let’s leave it at enough to fill a large part of the room. All went well.

Will Teams Take Over from Email Recording and Deck Online

The recording for the session is available online at the Microsoft Ignite 2019 site. A link to a copy of the deck is below.

A write-up for the talk is available on the AvePoint web site.

It’s difficult to formulate a collaboration strategy for an organization without good information. If you need to know more about the strengths and weaknesses of Teams and email inside Office 365, read the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook.

Another Day, Another Presentation at Microsoft Ignite 2019

Switching gears from new Exchange PowerShell cmdlets, I had the chance to speak in the 3,500-seat Chapin Theater at the Microsoft Ignite 2019 conference. My topic covered some of the lesser-known topics related to Teams like “Can I backup Teams?” and “Why do message blocked by DLP appear and then disappear?”

I had a lot of fun putting the deck together over the last few months. The point of the session was to inform people while having some laughs. Basically I’d ask a question, reveal the answer, and discuss why things work the way that they do, taking every opportunity to poke fun at myself, people in the audience, Microsoft, or other suitable targets.

Many of the topics covered in the presentation were uncovered through work on the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. Indeed, the answers to all the questions posed can be found spread across the chapters in the book, if only you knew where to look.

Recording and Copy of Deck

The recording of the session is available online. You can grab a PDF of the slides below.

Feedback

Thanks to those who attended who submitted feedback for the session, which is taken very seriously by both me and the conference organizers. I enjoyed reading the comments (you can always learn something). Anna Chu, who’s a member of the Microsoft organizing team for the conference, created a Word Cloud of the comments (Figure 2). It’s nice to know that people liked the talk.

Taped at the Microsoft Ignite 2019 Conference

Last Tuesday, Paul Robichaux and Tony Redmond taped episode #17 of the Office 365 Exposed podcast at the Podcast center at the Microsoft Ignite 2019 conference in Orlando. The folks running the podcast center were busy all week making it easy for people to come and tape high-quality shows.

Our guests were Mark Kashman, Senior Product Manager for SharePoint Online, and Ross Smith IV, Principal Product Manager for Intune. Ross has a long history with Exchange that informs some of his current work with Outlook Mobile while Mark is a very familiar figure in the SharePoint community (here’s a blog he wrote to announce new SharePoint compliance features, a topic we also covered).

Cortex, SharePoint, and Intune

We took the chance to quiz our guests about topics such as SharePoint Online reaching 100 million monthly active users (and why the other 100 million Office 365 users don’t use SharePoint), what Project Cortex is all about and how it differs from Delve and previous attempts to build a knowledge management portal inside Office 365, and what’s happening with Outlook mobile and Intune.

Paul published the recording on his blog. You can also subscribe and download the podcast from iTunes and other podcast libraries.

The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook keeps you up to date. That’s all we say.

Successful Experts Live (Norway) Event

The blog has been relatively quiet this week because I’ve been traveling to Germany and Norway to speak at the European Collaboration Summit (Wiesbaden) and Experts Live Norway (Oslo). I discussed if Teams will replace Email at ECS (you can grab a copy of the presentation here) before making a rapid departure for the airport.

Experts Live events are community run at either country or European level. In this case, Ståle Hansen, who writes Chapter 16 about Teams Meetings and Voice in the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook, asked me to come to Oslo to speak at the Norwegian event.

Experts Live Norway was very successful and a good example of how professional and interesting a national-level community event can be. The agenda included a good mixture of sessions covering topics like Azure, programming with the Graph API, Teams, and Office 365. Speakers were a mixture of Microsoft employees, MVPs, and subject matter experts. Most sessions were in English.

All About Office 365 Data Governance (in very little time)

I spoke about Office 365 Data Governance (you can download a PDF of the presentation below) and naturally didn’t manage to fit everything I wanted to say into the allotted time. Such is life. I’ve just got to try and stop telling stories and asking questions…

If, like me, you haven’t been to Oslo in a while, the city is very modern and vibrant. The number of electric cars is very noticeable with lots of Teslas and BMW i3s and an occasional Jaguar i-Pace. All in all, an enjoyable event.

Need help understanding Office 365 data governance and compliance technologies? Look no further than the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook, where we devote several chapters to unraveling these mysteries.

Searching for Good Office 365 Information

People ask me all the time about what conferences they should attend to stay up to date or learn about new developments in Office 365. Microsoft Ignite (November 4-8) is the obvious choice because it’s run by Microsoft, staffed by an incredible array of internal and external speakers, and offers great facilities (well, Ignite 2015 and the baloney served to attendees wasn’t so good). The downside of Ignite is its size. That, and the fact that many sessions are marketing pitches to announce technology that won’t be available in real-life tenants for six to nine months afterwards, makes many stay at home and watch recordings of the Ignite sessions afterwards. There’s a lot of sense in this approach.

TEC (The Experts Conference) Rides Again

The nice thing about a small technical conference is that you can get up close and personal with speakers. Which brings me to TEC (The Experts Conference), resurrected for 2019 after seven years by the fine people at Quest Software (who have been through their own journey in that time). TEC takes place in Charleston, NC on August 27-28, 2019.

TEC is very focused on technical best practices, or stuff that works in the field. This was always the case when TEC focused on Active Directory and everything related to AD, and I suspect the same will happen for the 2019 event. In any case, I’m on the schedule (first time in Charleston, SC) to speak about “How to Manage Microsoft Teams Successfully.”

If you’d like to attend TEC, you can get a 50% discount by using the code 50%OFFTEC!*!

ShiftHappens

Another small conference I’ll be speaking at is ShiftHappens, organized by AvePoint in Washington DC (June 12-13). I accepted the challenge of AvePoint’s avuncular CMO, Dux Raymond Sy, to come along and talk about keeping up to date with Office 365 and all the associated technologies. It should be a blast with people like Mary Jo Foley, Brad Sams, and Paul Thurrott speaking (a real collection from Petri.com).

Two in Europe

Before I get to go to the U.S., I’ll be speaking at the European Collaboration Summit in Wiesbaden, Germany on May 28 to cover the ever-popular topic of “Will Teams take over from Email?” Next up is Oslo for Experts Live Norway on May 29, where I get to talk about Office 365 data governance and compliance (use code Save300 to get a discount. There’s no rest for the wicked.

Going to speak at conferences usually results in learning lots of new stuff. I also get ideas for articles and things we should cover in the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. All goodness!

Vulnerabilities in Exchange, Why People Need to Upgrade, and SharePoint Storage

Last week, Microsoft held the annual MVP Summit at their Redmond HQ. Paul Robichaux and I took the chance to sit down with Greg Taylor, Director of Marketing for Exchange, and Brent Alinger, who has the onerous responsibility for shipping the on-premises versions of Exchange, to tape episode 14 of our Office 365 Exposed podcast. The tape is available online or via iTunes.

This episode was taped in building 27 on the Redmond campus, home of the “Microsoft Garage“. We cover the following topics:

Fixing the Recent Exchange Vulnerability

With Brent in the room, it was a chance to discuss some of the issues surrounding the recent attack on Exchange that forced Microsoft to make some architectural changes to the product in its relationship with Active Directory and the nature of EWS push notifications. Attacks happen all the time, but this one developed over a period combining a number of techniques. The discussion was a great insight into how Microsoft reacts to threat.

Exchange 2010 and The Need to Upgrade

One of the reasons why people who still run Exchange 2010 need to upgrade soon is that they’ll lose support for security fixes in early 2020. In our chat with Greg Taylor, we debate whether these companies should move to a newer version of Exchange on-premises or embrace the cloud and run Exchange Online. Greg feels that Exchange 2016 is a good choice. See if you agree.

Teams Announcements at Enterprise Connect

Moving back to the cloud, we discussed the set of Teams announcements Microsoft made at the Enterprise Connect show last week. Anything from the advent of shared (private) channels to whiteboard to new devices was fair game for us. We also chatted about the success of Teams now that 500,000 organizations use the app.

Storage and the Base Office 365 Workloads

In the last section of the podcast, we discussed how the two base Office 365 workloads (Exchange and SharePoint) handle the effect of retention policies. In a nutshell, Exchange provides storage in individual mailboxes (the recoverable items structure) to hold retained items and doesn’t charge this storage against a user’s regular mailbox quota. SharePoint takes a different approach and assigns a storage quota to the tenant as a whole and it’s up to the tenant to decide how to use that quota. The deployment of retention policies to SharePoint comes with a consequence for storage usage, so tune in to hear more.

Next Podcast

Paul and I are separated by the Atlantic, which makes it a little difficult to organize these podcasts. One of these days we will figure out how to use technology to make the task easier. Until then, stay tuned for the next podcast.

Podcasts are great, but they are a point in time view of a subject. A book that updates its content is another way to keep informed about what’s happening, and that’s what we do with Office 365 for IT Pros.

Office 365, Technologists, and Careers

On February 7, AvePoint’s Hunter Willis posted an article on Petri.com to lay out the case why people with Exchange expertise are best suited to lead Office 365 deployments. As you’d expect, this perspective didn’t go over too well with people who came to Office 365 from other technologies, notably the SharePoint community, and a flurry of tweets ensued.

In fact, anyone can lead an Office 365 deployment if they have the right mixture of technology, people, and political skills. One thing we know about the IT industry is that change is inevitable and ongoing all the time. If people can’t master change and learn how to move with the times, their career will suffer.

Picking the Right Person to Lead Office 365 Deployments

When I’m asked by CIOs and other executives about good candidates to lead an Office 365 deployment, my response is to look for someone who has the proven ability to master an ecosystem because they’ll need to do this for Office 365. One reason why Exchange and SharePoint were so successful as on-premises products is that they had a broad and deep supporting ecosystem of third-party and Microsoft technology. Some technologists working with these products stayed very focused on the core product, others mastered much more – and they’re the kind of people you need to lead projects.

Apart from knowledge of technology (practical and architecture) and being smart, the kind of attributes seen in these people are curiosity, a willingness to learn, the ability to assess the true worth of Microsoft and ISV technology and come to their own conclusion about its real value, and some project management skills. In short, the best leaders are all-rounders rather than brilliant technologists who understand the last iota about SharePoint, Exchange, or anything else.

Office 365 is Very Different in 2019

It’s undeniable that the role of the on-premises servers is now very different inside Office 365. When Microsoft launched Office 365 in June 2011, the cloud services were thinly disguised versions of the on-premises servers and operated in much the same way. Now, the advent of new apps like Teams, Stream, and Planner and new dependencies, like the Graph and Azure Active Directory (very different to its on-premises cousin) mean that a new approach to Office 365 is needed to drive real business value from cloud services. In the new world, Exchange delivers email and mailbox services to other apps; SharePoint delivers document management services. Instead of being at the core of their ecosystems, the cloud servers are contributors to the Office 365 ecosystem. People who specialized in Exchange or SharePoint on-premises must take a radically different attitude to how they work with cloud technologies to succeed with Office 365. It’s not the server anymore – it’s how a server delivers value to the rest of the ecosystem.

Over my career, I’ve been privileged to work with many very gifted technologists. I’ve been able to help quite a number develop and enhance their careers. All of those who succeeded shared the attributes mentioned above. In my mind, it’s the way to make sure that waves of technology change don’t leave people behind, beached and alone working with an old-style attitude to technology that was valid in 2011 and is not today.

Debating Office 365 and Careers

If you’re interested in hearing a 30-minute debate on the topic organized by the redoubtable Dux Raymond Sy (CMO of AvePoint), you can listen to a YouTube recording. A selection of the tweets is included in an AvePoint blog post.

The debate was recorded using a Teams meeting using anonymous join to allow people from around the world to contribute (I joined as a guest user connected to Teams in the Microsoft tenant). The recording was captured in Stream. As you listen, reflect on the fact that the technologies used to record the conversation didn’t exist inside Office 365 a few short years ago and have nothing to do with the on-premises servers people get so worked up about. Change happens. Embrace it and be happy to change. Your career will improve as a result.

Change is what we’re all about with the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. That’s why we publish a completely new and updated book every month to our subscribers. Which is one way to embrace change!

Something’s Always Changing inside Office 365

The Office 365 for IT Pros writing team does our very best to track the ongoing changes within the service so that we can analyze and report on important updates in the book. Given the volume of change, not all of which shows up in the Office 365 Roadmap or publicly announced by Microsoft, it’s a task that keeps us busy. This week was no exception. Here are some interesting things that happened.

Microsoft Responses to Dutch Complaints about Office

In November 2018, a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) report for the Dutch Government slammed Microsoft because of the volume and type of data gathered by Office 2016 and the Office Online Apps. Microsoft uses the data to track how people use their technology and identify problems, but in the era of GDPR you’ve got to be careful about consent, ownership, and control of data.

Politico.eu reports that Microsoft has committed to update the Office desktop products by the end of April 2019. What’s missing is any discussion about changes for the Office Online Apps, specifically SharePoint Online, or the other information gathered by Office 365 in places like the audit log (see my Petri.com article for details). I feel there’s more to come here.

Yammer Feels Pressure from Teams

The news that Yammer had lost out to Workplace by Facebook in GSK was known last November. To balance the ledger, Microsoft has large multinationals like Shell and public bodies like the Belgian Police to talk about how they use Yammer. On the surface, it’s OK to lose some customers if you’re gaining others.

But the fact that Teams now supports teams with up to 5,000 members puts pressure on Yammer from an internal source. Microsoft marketing uses an inner-outer loop analogy to position Teams and Yammer and worked quite well when the largest team maxed out at 2,500 members. Doubling the limit makes Teams a bigger danger to Yammer because it cuts the number of companies who need to deploy Yammer to support large-scale conversations.

Things aren’t all rosy for Teams. A 5,000-member conversation could be bedlam and the management tools mightn’t be quite ready to support such large groups. On the upside for Teams, it is better integrated into Office 365 than Yammer is, especially in terms of compliance and eDiscovery. It’s also true that the market growth is in Teams, so where this all leaves Yammer, even if its new management delivers what was promised at Ignite 2018, is anyone’s guess.

Exchange Fixes a Privilege Elevation Vulnerability

On Patch Tuesday this week, Microsoft issued updates for Exchange 2010, 2013, 2016, and 2019 to address a privilege elevation vulnerability. Unusually, Microsoft changed the internal architecture to address problems in Exchange Web Services (EWS) push notifications and its connection to Active Directory.

It’s interesting that although many reports were published about the original problem and the dire consequences that might ensue should an attack penetrate your Exchange server, relatively few sites followed up with coverage about the fixes. This proves that bad news is always easier to sell than good. It’s also worth noting that no evidence exists that the techniques exploited by the vulnerability were ever used to attack Exchange outside test conditions.

The EWS fix has been in production in Exchange Online for some time and no problems have been noted with clients that consume push notifications (to learn about new mail, for instance). It’s a nice example of how Office 365 validates fixes at massive scale before code is delivered to on-premises customers. On the other hand, it can be argued that the vulnerability is yet another reminder why it’s easier to run email in the cloud…

Charting Microsoft 365 E3 and E5

Microsoft employee Aaron Dunnage did the community a favor by publishing some graphics to illustrate the component parts of the Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 plans. Only licensing specialists find the details of the licenses and add-ons you might need for different Office 365 features, so it’s nice to have a graphic overview. A reduced-size version is shown below. To get the real thing, go to Aaron’s Github repository.

With so much changing that affects how Office 365 works, don’t you think you need to learn from a book that’s always being updated? Subscribe to Office 365 for IT Pros today!

A Really Interesting Office 365 Podcast

I mentioned some time ago that MVPs Paul Robichaux, Vasil Michev, and myself had got together at an event in Mallorca, Spain to tape an episode of the Office 365 Exposed podcast. Well, we did, and it was great – but the recorder failed to co-operate and we ended up with a recording that just didn’t work.

We eventually got back together on Wednesday of this week to re-record the episode. You can listen to the recording from Paul’s site or download from iTunes.

Topics in Office 365 Exposed

Although it’s always a pain to redo work, in this case we were able to talk about some recent topics that deserve coverage, including:

• The need for secure (private) channels in Teams.
• The FUD used by some backup vendors to justify their products to Office 365 tenants.
• Microsoft’s new transport rule to encrypt outbound email.
• Why the Information Protection implementation in SharePoint isn’t as good as it should be.
• Some Office 365 E5 features that have been moved to the Office 365 E3 plan.
• The new Teams usage reports in the Teams and Skype for Business Admin Center.
• The new OWA is generally available.

Sometimes the discussion got hot and heavy, but that tends to happen when people are passionate about a topic. We hope that you enjoy the show. If you have any ideas for topics you’d like us to talk about in the future, please let us know in a comment to this post.

The speakers in the Office 365 Exposed podcast all contribute to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. If you like how they argue on the podcast, you might just like the book too.

ESPC18 in Denmark

Next Wednesday, I shall be speaking at the European SharePoint Conference (ESPC18) in Copenhagen, Denmark. My chosen topic is “Office 365 Data Governance,” which is somewhat challenging because the underlying technology changes all the time. The recent introduction of sensitivity labels into Office 365 (available to E3 and E5 plans) is a good example because the new labels make protection (encryption) through rights management more accessible than ever before to Office 365 tenants.

Other examples are the ongoing efforts by the Teams development group to support different aspects of data governance. This year, they’ve added support for Office 365 retention policies and expanded their ability to capture compliance records for hybrid and guest users, including external people pulled into a 1:1 chat. Teams will soon support Office 365 data loss prevention policies too.

Microsoft has also reinforced the importance of the Office 365 audit log by increasing the retention period for records to 365 days for E5 users. On the other hand, Microsoft is still struggling with the problem of truncated records for Azure Active Directory events reported in September. All in all, data governance is an interesting area to review.

Expanding Views

One point I will be making is that Microsoft is not investing in workload-specific functionality for data governance within Office 365. Any new features that come along apply to all workloads that support the data governance framework (Yammer is still a notable outlier).

What this means is that anyone dealing with data governance topics like retention, protection, compliance, eDiscovery, and auditing needs to change their own mindset away from the products that they might know well to understand how things are done in a pan-Office 365 way.

Two base workloads exist inside Office 365 – Exchange and SharePoint. An Office 365 administrator absolutely needs to understand at least one of these workloads inside-out, but they also need to know how the other workload functions and how they two interoperate and support other applications like Teams and Planner. It’s a new world.

Presentation Slides

The slides I used for the session are posted online: Exploring Compliance With Office 365 – ESPC18

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If you can’t get to Copenhagen for ESPC18, you can still read about Office 365 data governance in Chapters 19 (retention), 21 (reporting and auditing), 22 (data loss prevention), and 24 (sensitivity labels and rights management) in the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook.

A Really Bad Idea

Microsoft’s big new idea that it would be “cool” or “awesome” (pick your descriptive term) if they could send Office 365 users emails with product training and tips ran into a heap of bad feedback from customers. The news was given to tenant administrators in a message center update (MC152628) on 30 October. The idea has now been withdrawn so that Microsoft can “review your suggestions.” In other words, the penny might have dropped for Microsoft to realize that they can’t send anything to tenant users without the say-so and upfront approval of the company who a) employs the target recipients and b) pays Microsoft for their Office 365 license.

I don’t know who came up with this bright (or dim) suggestion. In any case, it doesn’t matter because the idea is terrible no matter who conceived the plan. It smacks of a certain arrogance for Microsoft to believe that they have the right to communicate directly with people whom Microsoft has no commercial or other relationship. It’s not like sending out email to people who have bought an individual license for Office or Office 365 personal. The intended recipients were all Office 365 business users.

Disable End User Communications

Microsoft compounded the problem by setting the default state for End User Communications to “On.” Not every administrator would notice that a new setting had turned up in the Office 365 Admin Center, and many others would have been too busy to investigate.

The recommendation is to maintain control by going to the Settings section of the Office 365 Admin Center, select Services & Add-ins, and then set the slider for End user communication topics to Off. At least then you’ll have some control over communications if Microsoft persists with the idea following their period of mature reflection.

Creating a New Phishing Vector

Apart from anything else, if Microsoft sends unexpected email to end users, it’s a way of training those recipients to expect to see messages that they might trust (because of their origin), thus creating a potential vector that hackers might exploit in a phishing attack.

We’ve Been Here Before

In March 2017, Microsoft tried to execute another hare-brained plan to auto-generate Office 365 Groups for managers and ran into the same kind of protests. That plan died soon afterward, again after running into customer protest when they found out that Microsoft intended creating objects in the Azure Active Directory instances owned and managed by customers. Like this time, the plan reflected an arrogant notion that Microsoft knows best.

A Provider, Not an Educator

Microsoft is a provider of office services through Office 365. It is not an educator of end users. Sending unwanted and uninvited email is a form of spam, and in this case the spam couldn’t be blocked because it would be generated by a trusted partner inside the boundaries of Office 365.

Perhaps Microsoft should learn by asking customers what they think of proposed features before decisions hatched around a conference table in the Redmond HQ find their way into a product. It might just save everyone time and angst and allow Microsoft more time to deliver high-quality software and fix some of the flaws that have appeared in Office 365.

The One True API

As noted in my post about using the Graph Explorer tool, the Microsoft Graph has become the de facto API for most if not all Office 365 workloads. Some legacy APIs persist, like Exchange Web Services (for more information about using EWS, see Glen Scales’ blog), but the wind of Microsoft investment and engineering staff is behind the Graph, so it should be your future focus for programmable access to Office 365 data.

The biggest advantage the Graph brings to the programming community is to deliver a standardized method of dealing with the myriad forms of data found inside Office 365 from email to documents to people to calendars and anything in between. Authentication is based on OAuth, so it follows standards too. Anyone who knows how to use a REST-based API will be comfortable with the Graph.

PowerShell and the Graph

A word about PowerShell is in order here. The advent of the Graph doesn’t mean that PowerShell is going to go away anytime soon. Although many parts of Office 365 are now built using the Graph, PowerShell is still used throughout the suite to get stuff done. More importantly, PowerShell is used to solve administrative problems by a very large community of Office 365 administrators. The basic division between PowerShell and the Graph is that PowerShell never goes near data inside user repositories. You can use PowerShell to fetch details about a user mailbox, but not the actual contents of the mailbox. In the past, that work would be done by EWS; now, it’s a task for the Graph.

So, if you’re looking for something to automate administrative operations for Exchange, Teams, or Azure Active Directory, PowerShell is probably the best choice. On the other hand, if you want to manipulate messages, meetings, or contacts, go for the Graph. In some cases, like Teams or Planner, you might not be able to do something with PowerShell and have to use the Graph, but that’s OK because you can call Graph operations from PowerShell (here’s an example of using PowerShell and the Graph to process Teams data). Choice is good, and it’s good to have a choice of tools (if only we were granted the insight to make the right choice each time).

A New Series

To help programmers understand the Graph, Microsoft is running a “30 days of the Microsoft Graph” series of blog posts. Each post is intended to take 5-15 minutes to read about a topic linked to the Graph. The first few introductory posts are now online and are worth reading if you haven’t heard about the Graph.

The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook isn’t about programming Office 365, so we don’t touch on the Graph (too much). On the other hand, because a lot of what the book covers is how to automate common administrative operations, we include a lot of PowerShell. Over 1,100 examples in fact.

Growing at Over Three Million Monthly

Microsoft reported its Q1 FY19 results on October 24 and my comments about the results as they pertain to Office 365 are in today’s Petri.com article. I track these numbers pretty carefully and it’s interesting that Microsoft now uses a six-month period to update the MAU (monthly active user) data. Growth has been pretty consistent at between 2.5 million and 3.33 million over the last few years.

As I note in the article, the easy days of migration are over and the people who wanted to move workload to the cloud are there. Microsoft consistently says that they think that small to medium businesses should use cloud services. This is a reasonable stance for them to take because those organizations will likely get a much better (and more secure) service from Office 365 than they will by running on-premises servers. I think most customers accept this to be the case and those in the small to medium category (which is different from country to country) have largely moved over at this point.

More Difficult to Move The Rest

What this means is that the remaining on-premises base is mostly the larger and more complex organizations that need more support and time to migrate. Some of these organizations will never migrate and will continue to use on-premises servers, which is why they are happy to see Microsoft deliver the 2019 versions of Exchange, SharePoint, and Skype for Business earlier this week as support for on-premises servers now stretches well into the next decade.

Future Growth

Microsoft’s cloud business (powered by Office 365, Azure, and LinkedIn) is already massive and we don’t know how long it can continue to grow at the current rate. All we do know is that the cloud keeps on changing and evolving. Office 365 tenants need to keep their wits about them to track what’s happening in Office 365 (all apps) and Azure Active Directory (all the bits that interact with Office 365). It’s a big task, but that’s why we have the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook!

Writing in an Age of Change

On Monday, September 24, I spoke at Ignite to deliver a 20-minute theater session titled “
THR1044 – How to be an author and write about technology.” During the session, I was joined by Mary-Jo Foley, who writes the AllAboutMicrosoft.com blog. We reflected on how writing about technology has changed over the last few years as software moved into the cloud and the number of voices commenting on technology increased. We also offered some thoughts on how to start writing about technology, how to find your own voice and not duplicate what others have said, and even how to approach writing a book.

Anyone can write a blog. Six hundred words is the average for a post and that doesn’t take too long. Anyone can write a book too. It’s just a longer process, but “a page a day keeps the editor happy.” Finding the right topic is probably the hardest challenge, especially in a world where technology changes all the time.

Microsoft has posted a recording of the session online. Enjoy it at your leisure.

Discussing the State of Office 365

At 9am last Friday, the last day of the Ignite conference in Orlando, Paul Robichaux and I got together with Greg Taylor to discuss various topics loosely related to Office 365 in the latest episode of Office 365 Exposed, a podcast that we tape on an irregular basis when we are in the same place together for more than a day or so. You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and read Paul’s commentary on this episode on his blog.

Nine is a terribly early time to talk about anything, especially after being out late the night before at the conference’s attendee party at Universal Studios and then getting up early to fly in Paul’s Cessna over Orlando, so some of what we said might not make too much sense. At least, that was my conclusion after reading the transcript automatically generated by Stream when I uploaded the raw MP4 file given to us by the film crew a few minutes after we finished.

Video Transcripts

The idea behind automatic transcripts is that Stream is able to recognize words spoken on videos as it processes and publishes uploaded video content. Automatic speech recognition technology breaks the spoken word down into a series of captions that combine together to form the transcript. There’s a lot of heavy-duty technology here and only English and Spanish language videos are supported today.

But nice as it is to have an automatic transcript, the ability of the speech recognition engine to understand what is being said varies from very good to not so good. Take this interchange about the Teams background blur feature:

“you’d solve our resolve the full-grown blur yours as well but just enough“

“as an option to reverse that generative for way I’ve learned by interface“

“yeah, they’re nice I say that it that all actually that is a good point to make people aware of is”

Generating transcripts from videos is an advanced feature of Stream that’s part of Office 365 E5 (Stream Plan 2). And to be fair, it must be extraordinarily difficult to cope with three different accents (English, U.S., and Irish) from three grumpies, all of whom have no difficulty talking over each other.

In any case, you can edit the transcript to increase accuracy, and this is something that’s probably done by corporate marketing or internal communications people when important videos are posted to Stream for internal consumption. Fully correcting a transcript probably takes three times as long as a video, so you’d expect to spend at least two hours on this 43-minute extravaganza.

Meanwhile, the nice people at Practical365.com took the raw video and did a little editing to remove the bits before and after we taped the show and have posted the finished article for your viewing pleasure. The content didn’t improve, but perhaps you’ll be able to make more sense of what we said than Stream did.

We cover Stream in Chapter 7 of the Companion Volume for Office 365 for IT Pros. As Microsoft get through the migration of Office 365 Video to Stream, we might bring the topic back into the main book. Then again, we might not.

Wind-down in Orlando

The Office 365 for IT Pros team has scattered to the four winds and are now en route home to Ireland, the U.K., Finland, and Norway. Paul Robichaux flew his own plane home to Alabama yesterday after recording an episode of the Office 365 Exposed podcast, where we were joined by Greg Taylor, Director of Marketing for Exchange and Exchange Online. We recorded the show in one of the “pop-up” booths in the Community Central area of the Ignite hall, and the team who took care of us did a great job of generating audio and video feeds. Paul is processing the audio feed for iTunes and the video will be on Practical365.com soon. Stay tuned.

Before we recorded the podcast, Paul took some folks on a quick dawn tour over Orlando. It was great fun!

Ignite Overall

Ignite 2018 was a good conference. There were downsides, like flaky wi-fi connections in the exhibition hall and session rooms, and the food was so-so (IMHO), but really good content was shared with attendees. The problem some might have is to separate the content they can use today from announcements of directories and features that Microsoft will deliver at some point in the future. Ignite is a kind of launchpad for Microsoft to describe where they are going and what to expect over the coming year, and it’s important to always keep this fact in mind when listening to sessions.

Some complained at the technical level of sessions. I thought this was unfair. Sure, not every session was at 300 or 400 level, but there was more than enough good technical information available for people to justify their attendance. And anyway, the best thing about events like Ignite is the chance to meet people, reinvigorate connections, and learn from each other. You can always catch up on the sessions later, which is what I will be doing over the next few weeks.

Ignite Content

Microsoft is posting all the slides and recordings for all sessions online. You can find the sessions you want to view by searching the Microsoft Technical Community. For example, here’s the link to my talk about “Running a Tight Ship: Keeping Microsoft Teams Under Control.”

Slides and Shows

Looking at recordings online is great, but if you want to download slides and recordings for Ignite sessions so as to be able to view them offline, head over to the TechNet Gallery and grab a copy of Michel de Rooij’s download script. Be aware that you can consume lots of storage! And of course, you’ll want to run this command:

\Get-IgniteSession.ps1 -InfoOnly | Where {$_.Speakers -contains 'Tony Redmond'} | Select Title, location, startDateTime

… and then download the content!

Books, Books, Books

The Exchange product group was kind enough to buy 500 copies of Office 365 for IT Pros to giveaway at Ignite. Anyone who stayed right to the end of an Exchange session had a chance of getting a free book, and the offer seemed popular. All the free copies are gone now, but feel free to buy your very own copy here.

Ignite On Tour

Microsoft has announced they’ll be running 17 “Ignite on Tour” events around the world, starting in Berlin in December. There’s no news yet as to exactly what content will be presented at these events, but you can expect that many of the sessions will focus on delivering the latest news about Microsoft technologies.

On to 2019

As is the norm, Microsoft announced the date and location of the next Ignite conference at the end of this year’s event. No one was surprised to hear that we are going to be in Orlando again, but the news that the event is moving to later in the year was. November 4-8 seems like a better choice as Orlando should be less humid and hot. Pre-registration is now open for the 2019 event. It’s definitely an event worth considering.

If you can’t get to Ignite and don’t want to review all the Office 365 content shared at the event, why not invest less than $1/week (based on $49.95 for a subscription to a yearly edition) and buy a copy of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook? We do the work of sifting through Microsoft’s announcements, identifying what’s important, and documenting it in practical terms. That seems like a good thing. And $49.95 is a lot less expensive than the $5,000 cost of going to Ignite (conference fee, airfare, lodging, and other living expenses).

Talking PowerShell at Ignite

Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking at the Microsoft Ignite conference about how to use PowerShell to get real stuff done with Office 365. The session was in one of the twelve theaters dotted around the exhibition floor and attracted a good number, as evident from Jeff Guillet’s photo (above).

My premise is that anyone who wants to run an Office 365 tenant should know PowerShell. This doesn’t mean that you should be a professional programmer (I’m not at this point in my career). It does mean that you should know how to stitch together cmdlets to solve problems, possibly using code snippets found on the web (and tested thoroughly) as a base.

I covered four examples and told everyone in the audience that they could find the code online in Petri.com. Here’s a list of those articles.

• Using information in the Office 365 Audit Log.
• Using Teams compliance records to find out if a team is being used.
• Using PowerShell to control Office 365 licenses.
• Checking email addresses against the Pwned service.

Naturally, if you look in the Office 365 for IT Pros ebook, you’ll find hundreds of other PowerShell examples.

Off to Orlando

Any Ignite conference is a mixture of naked hyperbole, grand announcements, and gallons of Microsoft Kool-Aid pumped out in an incessant feed of information directed at the 26,000 attendees. People can listen in around the world to the live-streamed sessions, but there’s nothing quite like being at Ignite. It’s not just the conference sessions or the carefully-scripted Microsoft keynotes; it’s the noise and bright lights of the technical exhibition, the people in the community area, the contacts who you’ve lost touch with only to meet again outside a session room, and the parties. All the parties hosted up and down International Avenue from Monday to Friday, where free drink and food is paid for by Microsoft and other companies eager to make your acquaintance. Overall, Ignite is a blast.

This year’s event takes place next week at the Orange County Convention Center (OCCC) in Orlando. According to Microsoft, 57% of the attendees are IT Pros and 10% are developers. The rest are managers, other IT professionals, and the like. Apart from the Satya Nadella keynote, the event is concentrated in the West building of the OCCC. This will make it much easier to get between sessions and other important gatherings, like Community Central.

Today’s Petri.com article covers the Office 365 sessions. I could be accused of being too hard on Yammer, but my perspective is that you can run an Office 365 tenant without Yammer and not miss the technology, but it’s bloody hard to run a successful Office 365 deployment without Exchange Online. In any case, we’ll see what news is released at Ignite about all the Office 365 workloads and report back here as we integrate updated information into the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook.

Wait Before Writing

Don’t expect to see everything announced by Microsoft at Ignite 2018 turn up in the next update for the book. We have been bitten too often by the excitement generated by a grand announcement about new technology, so we will wait and see features turn up in our tenants before we will document anything.

In fact, we’re still waiting for some of the features announced last year to turn up, like the LinkedIn Integration with Office 365 (deployed to a small percentage of tenants). There have been other “big bets” that fizzled out, like the Knowledge Management Portal announced at Ignite 2015. The old adage of “one bitten, twice shy” makes us cautious when we hear about new technology, so we will take our time to assess, understand, and then document new features.

If you’re in Orlando, please be sure to come along and talk to the Office 365 for IT Pros team. We can guarantee that we’ll turn up to speak at our sessions, but aside from that, who knows where we will turn up.

The European Collaboration Summit 2019 takes place in Wiesbaden, Germany on May 27-29.

The event is unique in that it is user-organized, so attending the three days is very much cheaper than signing up for an event organized by companies, like Microsoft Ignite or IT/DEV Connections.

Great Value

Right now, you can buy a ticket for EUR160. If you leave it until May 2019, the same ticket will cost EUR350. The reason for the pricing difference is that the conference organizers try to have people sign up as quickly as possible so that they know what budget they have to play with, which makes sense when you don’t have the resources of a company backing the conference.

I attended and spoke at this year’s event and believe that ECS offers people real value, even if you have to pay full price because your company can’t make travel plans so far in advance. Where else will you get to attend a 3-day technology conference for so little?

The Need for Better Office 365 Coverage

ECS comes from a background of events organized by the SharePoint community and the agenda is still somewhat dominated by SharePoint, as are the technology exhibition and sponsors who support ECS. It would be nice to see a more balanced Office 365 agenda at the 2019 event that represents the full spectrum of technology that exists within and around Office 365, including Azure Active Directory and Microsoft 365.

In saying this, I understand that the event organizers are restricted by the session proposals they receive from speakers. However, they can take action to encourage submission from across the Office 365 technical community to build out a more balanced and comprehensive agenda.

Of course, the Office 365 for IT Pros team will try and help to expand the agenda… if our sessions are accepted. For the record, you can meet us at the UK Evolve conference on September 10 and at Microsoft Ignite from September 24-28.

Not Unusual for Conferences

ECS is not unusual in this respect. All conferences have histories and preferences that influence their session and speaker selection. I see other conferences proclaim that they cover Office 365 only to discover that the coverage is neither broad nor deep. Putting Office 365 on a slide and then focusing on a single aspect of a huge multi-dimensional cloud service was possibly acceptable in the early days of Office 365, when the only things that you could talk about were Exchange Online and SharePoint Online. It’s definitely unacceptable today.

Let’s hope that ECS 2019 has a great agenda and sets new records for user-driven Office 365 conferences. Knowing the folks involved in the organizing committee, I think they’ll do just that.

Of course, Office 365 for IT Pros takes a holistic view of the complete service. At least, we think we do.

Podcasts to Calm the Tortured Soul

For those interested in a little light listening over the weekend, head on over to Steve Goodman’s site and listen to the August 2018 episode of the podcast hosted by Steve and Jason Wynn. The title (” VPN rock, proxy, scissors“) is “interesting…”  And you get the chance to listen to Steve Goodman’s best radio DJ voice, honed over many years of late-night radio…

Seriously, it’s hard to find a good Office 365 podcast, and AllAbout365 is in this category. Then there’s Office 365 Exposed, the latest episode (23 October 2019) of which is now online to cover topics like what has to be done to make the Microsoft Ignite conference a reality.

AllAbout365 at the UK Evolve Conference 2019

Last week I had the chance to talk to Steve and Jason on the floor of the UK Evolve conference about topics such as why Teams tenant to tenant migrations are so difficult today. We also covered eDiscovery, compliance, and other subjects that just flowed “as the muse took us.” In other words, it was a blast.

Evolve, the UK’s premier one-day conference about Office 365 and associated topics is on Monday, September 10, 2018 at the National Conference Center in Birmingham. Entrance is free (get your ticket here). The Office 365 for IT Pros team is strongly represented – come along and enjoy these sessions. Heckling is gently invited, with the knowledge that we will heckle back.

You never know – we might even give away some books at the event.

Tony’s source material comes from Chapters 13 and 14, while Ståle’s is in Chapter 16. Paul’s comes from Chapter 13 and 14 too…

Meet the Office 365 for IT Pros Writing Team in Orlando

Many of the authors who contribute to Office 365 for IT Pros will be at the Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando (September 24-28). Ståle Hansen, Brian Reid, Jussi Roine, and Tony Redmond are all scheduled to speak. The full schedule is being gradually developed by Microsoft as they slot sessions and presenters into time slots and rooms. We will update our information here as we receive it from the Ignite organizers.

Office 365 for IT Pros Sessions at Microsoft Ignite 2018

A session Id of THRxxxx means that it’s a 20-minute theater session presented on one of the stages erected around the technology exhibition. The BRK sessions are either 45-minute or 75-minute sessions. You can get previous episodes of the Office 365 Exposed podcast on  iTunes. All are welcome to come along and heckle at the podcast.

The full Ignite session catalog is available online. Like all Ignite conferences, it’s likely that the details of sessions will change as the conference approaches to move times around, introduce new sessions, or even drop some sessions.