M365 - Exchange Online Center

Email has long been the primary communication channel for organizations of all sizes, and this is unlikely to change in the near future. Although headlines often spell doom for email and appoint its successor, email usage is actually increasing at a global scale. That's not to say email is without its problems. Lately we have seen a lot of focus on reducing the amount of time spent in Outlook, with features such as Clutter, Focused Inbox, sweep rules/actions and My Analytics.

There are a few compelling reasons to move to Office 365, and in my opinion, Office 365 Groups are at or near the top of that list. Office 365 Groups combine resources from across Office 365 in ways that are not possible on-premises to give end users interesting new functionality.

I can hear you now: “Wait! You and Tony record new episodes quarterly?  In California? Why are you posting a new episode already?”

With the increasing number of services and features in Office 365, keeping up with all the changes can be a challenge. Keeping an eye on all the different ways a user can do harm, either willingly or by mistake, is not an easy task, either. While the on-premises versions of Exchange and SharePoint do offer some form of auditing, many organizations were surprised to find out that things were quite different after their move to the cloud.

Microsoft has been busy releasing features for Exchange Online over the last couple of weeks, so I thought this would be a good time to talk about three new features: Focused Inbox, Outlook Mentions and Certificate Based Authentication.

Office 365 Groups (that’s Groups with a capital “G”) are a newish feature of Office 365 that allow for collaboration across several different cloud applications. Office 365 Groups are the cloud only evolution of Site mailboxes, a technology introduced with Exchange and SharePoint 2013 that gave users a single place to access data stored on both Exchange and SharePoint.

Security and compliance are big concerns for corporate customers moving to Office 365. As such, Microsoft is putting a lot of resources into ensuring that customers have the tools they need to ensure their data is kept securely and compliantly.

Phishing attacks are ever more common for all email users. These attacks can target organizations or individual users.. Most phishing emails are easy to spot, but even the savviest of us can be caught off guard, and when a user ends up clicking on a dangerous link in an email message, then suddenly a bunch of servers start getting encrypted and your whole weekend is ruined. In an attempt to help reduce this problem, Microsoft is currently rolling out email safety tips as part of Exchange Online Protection in Office 365.

Forwarding might not be one of the most used features when it comes to email, but it’s certainly common enough. I know I’ve had to deal with it in a lot of related cases back in my support days. While most of the issues you might run into are easy enough to solve, there are so many different ways to configure forwarding that oftentimes people get confused. In this article we will review (some of) the forwarding-related options and introduce you to a recent change in handling forwarding in Office 365/Exchange Online.

Office 365 is a collection of online services that allow organizations to use Exchange, Skype for Business, and SharePoint in the cloud. In the nearly five years that Office 365 has been available most of the organizations using Office 365 have used it just like that; for Exchange or Skype for Business or SharePoint in the cloud. Some organizations are using more than one of those services, but for the most part they are still using them separately.