Office 365 Exposed

Tony Redmond and Paul Robichaux

Cool.  Got to sit in the studio audience for this.  They are broadcasting or recording for podcast for 0365.

Crowds are massive. Easier to atttend streamed keynotes.  Big problems are the distance between buildings.  Food here is just above average. 

Lots of talk about compliance and GDPR from the show floor.  

New Microsoft announcements:

1. Tons of teams announcements.  Good job of breaking teams down in architecture. Where it stores files, and how it will replace skype for business client. Lots of good.  Less effective: lack of offline access and tough on slow networks.  Teams was announced last year, and available in March.  Lots of usage and pilots among people here.  125k orgs are now using teams.  Teams is built for the enterprise.  
2. Multi geo tenants for exchange.  Not a solution for network problems.  Moving data to new geo locations won’t solve performance issues.  Rather, geo tenants allows for those who have data restrictions can take advantage of it.  GA early 2018.
3. Exchange 2019. Sharepoint and skype 2019. For exchange it is the tenth product release. Gives a feeling of confidence to folks who are still on prem.  This will extend support for on prem till 2028.  Could be a big deal for enterprise companies to allow them to continue to run in a supported manner.  Also allows for hybrid customers to be supported. 

Every time you create a team, it creates a group.  So groups is a big foundation for teams.  10M users use teams daily.  

Big lesson around teams is “let me turn off self service”. Groups by nature are self service.  Lots of people have disabled groups.  But this causes issues when people decide to give up waiting for It groups.  

Another issue is there is no limit on the names that are used to create teams.  Big issue when users create teams which creates groups if they use the same name.   Could have many teams named “Chris group”.  Feedback: naming policy is bad.  

Drag and drop support for groups.  This is a win.  Not yet on mobile, but perhaps coming?

Future options coming in the future.

• Expiration based on usage not on date.  Potential future option.
• Collaboration outside of firewall.  Allows users outside the org.
• Reattestation of guests.  Every x days question to see if guest is still valid?
• Add guest, with some protections.
• Compliance. Retention policy.  Soft deleted teams. Labels.  (Tag content.  Can do it manually, or apply auto labeling). Then, tie label to a policy.  Look in this area.  Some pieces in place, but looking for future enhancements.
• Tell where teams were created from and where groups were created from.
• Programmatically create teams.  Preprovision teams automatically.  

Big take away:

Linked in content sync.  Starting soon, there will be a connection to LinkedIn from O365.  Set on by default.  Will eventually be enabled outlook desktop.