M365 - Exchange Online Center

One of the best things about Office 365 is that we can always count on new features and functionality to be available. Microsoft is constantly working to improve the services already live in Office 365, as well as working to create new services. Some of the new services added do have an additional licensing fee attached, but Microsoft also adds a considerable number of features to the license SKUs already in-place.

There are many ways you can manage and control the way your end-users connect to Office 365. Intune, and Azure Active Directory Premium are add-on feature sets for your Office 365 subscription that give you advanced controls for managing client access scenarios, but some customers want a lower level of control that they can implement without having to buy add-on licenses.

I have long been interested in encryption. I started off my IT career in the United States Marine Corps where I had a Top-Secret security clearance and frequently worked with classified message traffic. During this time, I learned a lot about the rules of encryption and security. Most of what I learned, however, is that encryption is incredibly hard to do correctly.

Office 365 is Microsoft's premier cloud service, and the clear leader in the "back office" server cloud offering market. If your organization has not moved to Office 365 yet, it's a safe bet that someone within your organization will be making a strong push to get you there soon.

When you create a new mailbox in Exchange Online, that mailbox comes with specific settings, features, and protocols enabled. As an Office 365 administrator, you have the ability to go back and modify these settings later if - for instance - you don't want users to have their default mailbox size limit set at 100 GB, or if you want a specific retention policy applied to that mailbox.

Back in September of last year, I wrote an article about Multi-Factor Authentication for Office 365. Since the cloud refuses to stand still, it looks like it’s time to update that post with some new information.

For most of the last 25 years or so, most people with “office” jobs have relied on email as their primary communications tool at work. During that time, Microsoft has added many ways for groups of people to collaborate within their email clients: distribution lists, public folders, shared mailboxes, resource mailboxes, site mailboxes, and Groups. How does an organization decide which of these options to use? When are shared mailboxes the best choice?

It's safe to assume if you're reading this you're very aware of "the cloud." Unless you've been under a rock for the last five or six years, you know Microsoft has gone all in on their cloud services. You've heard a thousand reasons why you should move your organization’s IT services to the cloud. But that doesn't mean every organization should. Here are some reasons not to move to the cloud. 

I had an interesting discussion recently with a customer about email encryption in Office 365. The customer wanted to know the pros and cons of each encryption option in Office 365.  This customer’s main goal was encrypting email messages so Microsoft can’t access them. Here's a summary of the different encryption options in Office 365, and how to encrypt your data (and why you would want to) so Microsoft can’t access it inside Office 365.