Sunday, May 10, 2020

Office 365 Split Tunneling

With COVID-19 many organizations are dealing VPNs that are stressed and saturated.  One solution many organizations have been considering is using Split-tunneling for Office 365 traffic.  If you have not looked at it, please do.  There are several good articles that you should read up on.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/enterprise/office-365-vpn-split-tunnel


New Microsoft Teams Features

I take it for granted because I get access to all the Office 365 features before they get on the market because I sit in Microsoft’s internal “dog food” deployment rings.  Now I can finally talk about some features of Teams that were released in April 2020.

Here is a reference: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/what-s-new-in-microsoft-teams-april-2020/ba-p/1347929

Features I love are:

  • We can now see 9 streaming videos vs. the previous of 4.  The Brady bunch view.
  • Raising Hands – Yes try using it.  Helps you to control a room so you do not have people trying to talk over here.
  • Background Effects – When you do a video, instead of just blur, have a nice picture in the background.
  • Live Events Increased – will be raised from 10,000 to 20,000 through July 1, 2020.
  • End the Meeting for all participants
  • There is a new meeting dashboard.
  • New Teams App Usage reporting
  • New lobby controls


Sunday, May 3, 2020

Office 365 Records Management

A few days ago, it was announced that a new Records Management solutions went GA for Office 365.  I was super excited to see this because I have done a lot of Records Management work in the early days of SharePoint 2007 and 2010.  Back then, the SharePoint Server Records Management records collection was pretty basic.  However after reading what we are now doing with Records Management with Office 365, I can see some huge steps forward.  This is much more sophisticated than in-place records management using the content organizer.

Here are the key takeaways I had.

  • New and advanced capabilities to classify, retain and dispose data.
  • Advancements leverage cloud machine learning capabilities to identity and classify records.
  • New capability for event based retention policies.
  • Works for SPO and EXO plus documents stored in Teams (which uses SPO).
  • Requires you to purchase of E5 because it is leveraging advanced cloud features inside of data governance, labeling, etc.  Minimally you need the Office 365 Advanced Compliance SKU.  Apparently not everyone in the tenant needs to be licensed, only users with edit access where records management features are used must be licensed.

Announcement - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/security-privacy-and-compliance/announcing-general-availability-of-records-management/ba-p/1347879
Announcement - https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/?p=90980
Service Description - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/records-management?view=o365-worldwide
Licensing - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/servicedescriptions/microsoft-365-service-descriptions/microsoft-365-tenantlevel-services-licensing-guidance/microsoft-365-security-compliance-licensing-guidance#records-management