The recent March 15th Microsoft 365 outage would explain why many of your users were complaining and submitting support tickets that day. Unfortunately, that is the least likely scenario for most problems. While Microsoft has occasional issues, the real problem is usually elsewhere.
Office 365 is a tremendous service that we all know and love. With Office 365, IT Pros and end users alike are equipped with a multitude of applications (Exchange Online, Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, and more) that enable easier collaboration and increased productivity. Something as simple as collaborating on a word document in real time has changed the way people work.
Microsoft has had a bad run lately. First, there was Solorigate, a major supply-chain attack (hack), through which attackers seem to have been able to access and copy (parts of) source code for various Microsoft (cloud) solutions, including Exchange and Intune. Next, at the beginning of March 2021, there was ‘Hafnium’, a severe vulnerability in Exchange Server which left all on-premises installations of Exchange Server vulnerable to exploitation by a web shell, enabling attackers to fairly easily establish foothold into the on-premises environment.
Now that the long frigid months of winter have passed, spring is the time to open the windows, sweep away the cobwebs, and start anew. While most IT leaders would agree that keeping the IT house in order is very much a year-round effort, spring brings a reminder to pull out the white gloves and take a closer look for any technical debt hiding in the dusty corners. And your first order of business should be to begin re-assessing your Microsoft Exchange and Office 365 management strategy.
In Microsoft Exchange Server 2013, the Outlook Anywhere feature, formerly known as RPC over HTTP, lets clients who use Microsoft Outlook 2013, Outlook 2010, or Outlook 2007 connect to their Exchange servers from outside the corporate network or over the Internet using the RPC over HTTP Windows networking component. This topic describes the Outlook Anywhere feature and lists the benefits of using Outlook Anywhere.
By establishing a hybrid deployment, you can extend the feature-rich experience and administrative control you have with your existing on-premises Exchange Server organization to the cloud. A hybrid deployment also offers support for a cloud-based archiving solution for your on-premises mailboxes with Exchange Online Archiving and may also serve as an intermediate step towards a complete migration of your on-premises mailboxes to Exchange Online.
I imagine that about a week after the first customer was on-boarded into Office 365 they decided that they needed to do a tenant-to-tenant migration. While that is probably not how it went, I suspect I am not too far-off reality with that one.
Customizing and configuring an Exchange organization has been a daily task for Exchange administrators for years. In a local Exchange organization, you can customize mostly anything you like. There is no requirement for enabling the organization for customization. But in Exchange Online, the situation is different.
It’s no secret that the IT landscape has changed dramatically over the past 8 months. Due to the pandemic, organizations have had to pivot overnight, and what was hoped to be a short-term problem has turned into the new normal. This applies to the way these organizations deal with their customers, employees, and business partners.
In many organizations, there is no clear answer for the question "Who really owns Microsoft 365?" And because there's no simple answer, I’ve had to break this blog into two parts.
It is assumed that IT departments own Microsoft 365 (M365), as M365 is a technology platform, and that makes sense. However, in larger organizations, in which IT departments are made up of multiple business units or teams, who owns M365 amongst them?