The number of guest accounts in Azure AD keeps growing, largely due to usage in Microsoft Teams. In this article, we describe five basic management steps to control where guests come how, how they connect, what they can do and access, and removing inactive guests. It's the kind of thing all Microsoft 365 tenants should do.
In the second article of this 2-part series, we describe the alternatives that exist to help secure access for remote workers, exploring the worthy features that don’t require MDCA. The features detailed in this article are available for any tenant with Azure AD Premium licensing and offer a more generic set of controls for tenants where MDCA licensing is not available.
In many organizations, Microsoft 365 is a significant investment. However, you get so much with Microsoft 365 E3 licenses that many organizations are unaware of, including beneficial features across Productivity, Compliance, Security, and Device management. Kat Greenan shares some of her secrets and the hidden gems that can be found in a Microsoft 365 E3 license.
Microsoft insists that encrypted SharePoint and OneDrive for Business files found by eDiscovery searches can only be decrypted by Advanced eDiscovery, which requires Office 365 E5 licenses. This seems unfair, especially as Office 365 E3 tenants can create and use sensitivity labels to protect Office documents stored in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. An example of not very joined up thinking when it comes to software licensing?
When performing a cost-benefit analysis of the Microsoft 365 E5 license for users in your organization, cost is usually the deciding factor as the quality of the features are rarely disputed. However, there are some who argue that to maintain a "Better" Security and Compliance posture as suggested by Microsoft, some of these key security features should be made more widely accessible and affordable and therefore included in the E3 license structure. Microsoft MVP Peter Rising took his debate to Twitter, conducting a straw poll where the results show there is clearly an appetite for more choice when it comes to Microsoft 365 licensing.
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Updates to Outlook clients (desktop, mobile, and OWA) respect the advanced settings in label policy which previously needed the deployment of the unified labeling client. Many organizations want to use mandatory labeling, but have been frustrated because of the lack of support in the Office applications. Now support is available, so it's time to label that email!
Sensitivity labels are an effective way to manage containers like Teams, Microsoft 365 Groups, and SharePoint sites. Microsoft doesn't provide any way to track changes made to labels assigned to containers, which means that a group owner can downgrade the policy assigned through a label. This article explains a method to detect when label changes occur for containers and how to revert those changes if necessary.
Microsoft has released a preview of co-authoring for protected (encrypted) Office documents using the desktop apps. While it might seem straightforward to enable co-authoring (and the online apps have been able to do this for over a year), making it work for the Office desktop apps requires a complex mix of Office, SharePoint Online, the OneDrive sync client, and sensitivity labels. Once everything lines up, it works beautifully, even if you can't take a screenshot to prove that it works.
In the third part of this series, Peter Rising discusses the impact of applying sensitivity labels at the container level, where document level label settings are already in place.
