[m365weekly] #28 – M365 Weekly Newsletter

☁️What’s on my mind

Are clouds secure? This is the eternal question I get very often. And my answer, actually question, is the same for the last 10 years: do you have all the resources, all that hundreds of millions of green ones that major players are putting yearly into securing their cloud infrastructure? And: which is more likely to happen: your company burns down or a data center burns down?

In a very hard touch of irony the data center of French cloud provider OVH burnt down recently and many businesses are left with very real data ashes. Many backups got burned in the same fire, too.

And that leaves me questioning my own beliefs. Are clouds safe? I still believe they are. Did OVH do all their homework with data redundancies in their data center(s)? Obviously not.

Have a nice Easter holiday.
Matic Z.

💻 Productivity & Modern Workplace

What you need to know about linking to files and pages in SharePoint. Have you ever shared a file on SharePoint just to discover moments later that the link is not working for the receiving party? Yeah, sometimes it’s unreasonably complicated. Read what you need to be careful about when linking and sharing.

Microsoft Revamps SharePoint/OneDrive Sharing Link to Highlight Permissions. SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business have a new sharing link control that highlights the permissions assigned to sharing recipients. It’s a minor tweak.

Live transcription with speaker attribution now available in Microsoft Teams meetings for English(US). Useful for cases when you’re joining late or you just don’t want to be present in a meeting. You can get a transcription with the speaker attribution. Unfortunately, only for US English at the moment.

How to move your Samsung Cloud data to Microsoft OneDrive. Samsung is killing some features in Samsung Cloud, including Drive Storage and Gallery Sync. Microsoft is offering the same amount of data for free in the first year.

New Reduced Data Usage Mode for Teams Mobile Clients. When you’re on the go you can now drastically reduce the data consumed on your Teams meetings. The feature is rolling out now.

Teams Desktop and Browser Clients Can Update User Out of Office Notification Settings. Given that a lot of us are not “living” mostly in Outlook anymore but we use Teams instead it is a bit confusing that we can’t set “out of office” reminders in Teams but we have to switch to Outlook or OWA to do so. Ok, soon we’ll be able to set “out of office” from Teams clients, too. Useful.

Microsoft 365 Universal Print Now Generally Available. Universal Print doesn’t need any on-premises infrastructure if you have Universal Print-compatible printers. Very useful for the scattered workforce in pandemic circumstances.

Don’t use Save As, use New. Have you ever inadvertently overwritten a file because you used the Save command instead of Save As? This simple tip helps to avoid that.

5 things you may not know about the free version of Microsoft Teams. The free version of Teams is, well … free. And it lacks a lot of features paid version has.

☁️Sysadmin Stuff

What SysAdmins Can Expect for Microsoft Teams in 2021. Microsoft Teams saw major usage gains in 2020. In this post, the author outlines what is coming in 2021 and his top security best practices for your Teams deployment.

Microsoft Teams and on-premises mailboxes: Part 1 – How do Teams and Exchange Server interact? Teams and Exchange server are deeply connected and intertwine on quite some points. Calendar and private chats are being just two of them.

Microsoft 365 Backup: A User’s Useful Guide Against Data Loss. Do you want to ensure your data is as secure as possible? If so, read this full Microsoft 365 backup guide.

Switch between Office update channels and enable Teams Preview features. With a small registry entry, you can switch Office update channels on demand. And with a simple URL tweaking, you can get to the new preview features for your Teams web sessions.