Two Office 365 Message Center notifications bring news about an increase in the number of participants for a Teams group chat to 100 and improvements in shareable links for files. Moving the limit from 50 to 100 for a group chat makes these conversations more flexible. Adding permissions to the sharing links used by Teams gives users more control over how they share information with others.
Sometimes Office 365 can be infuriating. My latest tribulation came in the form of missing retention labels, which disappeared from SharePoint Online without any reason for two weeks. Some labels returned due to auto-label policies, but any applied to documents manually had a vacation somewhere in the bowels of the services. It wasn’t a good experience.
A new feature makes it easier for Office 365 users to share documents in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business libraries with LinkedIn first-degree contacts. The LinkedIn folks are now included in the suggested people list. It’s much easier to pick someone from a list than to look for their email address (which might be out of date). Before you can share with LinkedIn, your Office 365 tenant and user account must be configured to support the connection.
Microsoft announced that the Office 365 E3 and E5 plans will receive new Information Protection licenses. They’re preparing for the introduction of sensitivity labels and the increased use of encryption to protect access to content in Office 365 apps like SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, and Teams. You don’t have to do anything to prepare for the new licenses, but it’s nice to know what they are and how the licenses are used.
Making it easy to protect Office 365 content with encryption is great, but it has some downsides too. One of the obvious problems that we have is that encrypted documents in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business libraries can’t be found unless their metadata holds the search phrase.
Microsoft is now rolling out the “Recent” view in OneDrive for Business to expose the set of recently-accessed documents for a user.
Office 365 tenant administrators can use different ways to access user data. Shouldn’t you have a policy to govern that access?
Microsoft says that they will soon send email to users when Office 365 detects a higher than normal number of file deletions in SharePoint Online sites and OneDrive for Business accounts. There’s no real detail provided as to what counts as a high volume or why Microsoft is sending the notifications.
The security company Avanan says that 10% of Office 365 users are affected by “PhishPoint.” That estimate seems pretty high to me.
SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business sites will soon boast 100 minimum versions, which they need to power features like AutoSave and OneDrive Restore. But if you work for an organization that doesn’t want to use so many versions for files, you can update your SharePoint tenant configuration to disable minimum versioning. That is, provided you do so by September 30, 2018.