Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Delivery Milestones for Delve and Groups for Office 365

If you were at the SharePoint Conference in March 2014, there were some big vision announcements made - http://blogs.office.com/2014/03/03/work-like-a-network-enterprise-social-and-the-future-of-work/. Mostly notably in the area of Enterprise Social. Microsoft is taking many of the solutions that were very successful with Yammer and adopting these solutions into Office 365. This resulted in:

  • Office Graph – This is fabric inside of Office 365 that can look at email, conversations, documents, sites, instant messages, posts, etc. and evaluate your relationship with people and things. This is then used as an engine to provide collaborative and social end user experiences.
  • Delve – Formerly codename Oslo, is a new app and user experience built on top of Office Graph which delivers a personalized (and security trimmed) connecting a person to business data across the enterprise based on interaction, communications and collaboration with other people. If you want to learn more about it – go here - http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/business/what-is-delve-FX104369201.aspx.
  • Groups for Office 365 – This is a really cool new feature that allows users to quickly and easily create a group. In that group there is a shared calendar, shared mail, shared conversation, shared documents, etc. The beautiful thing about this is that the end user experience is consolidated such that Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Office Online experience all in one. The user does not need to bounce around to differ applications, it is just a simple end user experience. No more having to independently create a team site, shared calendar, shared mailbox, etc. I feel I am doing an injustice to this new feature because it is so cool and I do not have a lot of time to write about it. If you want to learn more about it, please go here - https://support.office.com/en-US/Article/Find-help-about-groups-in-Office-365-7a9b321f-b76a-4d53-b98b-a2b0b7946de1.

The reason why I writing this blog is that both Delve and Groups have reach major milestones in Sept 2014 and are now being released into the Office 365 for customers to start using. For more information:

New Exchange Online Protection Bulk Compliant Level and Phishing Confidence Level

In this new blog post - http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2014/09/25/take-advantage-of-eops-new-bulk-mail-detection.aspx - there was an announcement enhancements in regards to how Exchange Online Protection (EOP) will handle Bulk Mail Detection. I found this interesting because I have this discussion all the time with customers who are evaluating Exchange Online and EOP.

Today in EOP, under advanced options, there is a Yes/No flag called “Block all bulk mail messages”. In the Microsoft blog they correctly called out this as a “gray area”. I have always had the exact discussion of “what constitutes” bulk email because there can absolutely be legitimate external email campaigns with information that can be important to a business. What they have said up to today is that EOP has not been very aggressive when evaluating bulk email. This is changing.

Moving forward in EOP, a new header is available called X-Microsoft-Antispam. In this header will be values for BCL (Bulk Complaint Level) and PCL (Phishing Confidence Level). What you can do now is have the ability to evaluate the X-Microsoft-Antispam header in a transport rule and if the BCL or PCL level is too high for your liking, you can then set the SCL (Spam Confidence Level) to an appropriate level and then have message route to the end user using the policies you have set-up (send to quarantine, send to junk mail folder, etc., etc.). They also noted in the blog that they plan to change the “Block all bulk mail messages” flay from Yes/No to a value based level set which will be an alternative to creating the transport rule that I just discussed.

Here are some other good links which were on the blog on this subject: