Information about SharePoint, Microsoft 365, Azure, Mobility and Productivity from the Computer Information Agency
If you login to the Office 365 portal as an administrator and have a look under the Admin option on the left hand side you should now see a new item – Compliance
This will now be the central location to quickly and easily access anything to do with compliance in your organisation. Such as:
– Archiving
– eDiscovery
– Retention
– Permissions
These options will continue to increase over time so check back regularly to see what’s been added.
Recently I wrote a post about how you can configure then send and receive encrypted messages using Office 365. Microsoft has recently announced the release of dedicated mobile apps for Android and iOS that allow you to read these messages on your mobile device.
You can find the download at:
This means you can read and reply to Office 365 encrypted messages. This should make the adoption of secure messaging much easier as well as highlight that Microsoft is serious about the privacy and security of your information.
Microsoft keeps the new features of Office 365 rolling with the release of Clutter:
http://blogs.office.com/2014/11/11/de-clutter-inbox-office-365/
To enable Clutter you’ll need to have enabled the office 365 first release program which I details previously at:
https://blog.ciaops.com/2014/09/enabling-office-365-first-release.html
Once the first release feature is enabled you’ll need to wait for Clutter to appear. To check, go to your Outlook Web Access page in the Office 365 portal (i.e. click the Outlook at the top of the page, along the menu bar, when you login to the portal).
Then select the Cog in the top right corner. From the menu that appears select Options.
From the menu on the left expand the Automatic processing and then select Clutter from the list. Note the Clutter option won’t appear for you until it has been rolled out to your tenant. On the right select the option to Separate items identified as Clutter and then select Save. Now you are good to go with a leaner inbox, which will hopefully get leaner over time as the Clutter algorithm learns more about what is important to you.
Once you enable Clutter you’ll see an additional folder created under you inbox called Clutter. It is into here that message deemed non-essential will automatically be routed,
In essence it seems that Clutter is basically automatic mail rules. It uses machine learning to determine what is ‘important’ and re-routes what isn’t to a sub-folder.
Having used email rules for year to have a more productive email system this doesn’t appear to be a major improvement for the way I work. However, I do know it will be HUGE for almost everyone else because I rarely see others effectively use mail rules for the inbox. They simply allow email to accumulate in their inbox where they never read them. So, the whole process taking place automatically is going to really benefit the majority of users who are currently swamped with emails.
Remember, each user will have to enable Clutter for themselves, inside their own portal login using the process outlined above.
There you have it. Another features added to Office 365 to help your productivity. What do you think? is this helpful? What could be improved? Will you use it? I’d love to hear. I’m interested to see how it interacts with any existing inbox rules, which I assume will be applied PRIOR to Clutter taking over??
As you can see from the above graphic and the following page:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/exchange-online-limits.aspx
This increase applied to suites, while the standalone Exchange Online plans shared mailboxes remain at 10GB max (but here’s a little secret, you can actually store more than 10GB in there, it just can’t send or receive emails when it gets above the 10GB limit, but you can happily store more than 10GB of email in there if you really wanted to. This has always made it a great archiving solution, given that it is free and all).
Office 365 Exchange Online shared mailboxes (which are free and unlimited) have been boosted to a maximum size of 50GB like any normal mailbox. Shared mailboxes cannot be logged into directly, they can only be access from users with a license for Exchange Online.
So if you need to archive an old user’s mailbox, just convert it to a free Shared Mailbox (using PowerShell of course). Gotta love Office 365 don’t ya?
If you weren’t aware, Office 365 supports sending encrypted messages to anyone. Basically, they get an email telling them to login to a web portal to view the message. Here’s how to make all that work.
You’ll firstly need to enable Rights Management for your tenant. To do that login to the Office 365 portal as an administrator.
On the left hand side select Service Settings.
This will expand a menu as shown above. From this menu select Rights Management.
On the right now select the Manage hyperlink.
Select the Activate button to enable Right Management.
Confirm that you wish to enable by selecting the Activate button.
After a few moments the screen should update.
You are now going to need to run some PowerShell commands. if you haven’t done this check out this previous blog post to get your environment setup:
Configuring PowerShell Access in Office 365
Once you have connected using PowerShell you’ll need to run the following commands depending on your location:
USA: Set-IRMConfiguration -RMSOnlineKeySharingLocation https://sp-rms.na.aadrm.com/TenantManagement/ServicePartner.svc
Europe: Set-IRMConfiguration -RMSOnlineKeySharingLocation https://sp-rms.eu.aadrm.com/TenantManagement/ServicePartner.svc
Asia-Pacific: Set-IRMConfiguration -RMSOnlineKeySharingLocation https://sp-rms.ap.aadrm.com/TenantManagement/ServicePartner.svc
In my case I used the Asia Pacific URL as shown above.
You then need to run the command:
Import-RMSTrustedPublishingDomain -RMSOnline -name “RMS Online”
which produces the above result.
Then this command:
Set-IRMConfiguration -InternalLicensingEnabled $True
Finally run the command:
Test-IRMConfiguration -RMSOnline
and ensure the result come back OVERALL RESULT: PASS
With that done you can now return to the Office 365 management portal as an administrator to set up a message encryption transport rule.
In the top right of the Office 365 portal select Admin and then Exchange from the menu that appears.
From the menu on the left select mail flow.
Select the Plus icon on the right and the option Create a new rule from the menu that appears.
Now there are lots of different options when creating an Office 365 Transport Rule but I am not going to cover these. This post is aimed at showing you the basics of enabling Exchange Online Message Encryption. If you want more information about Office 365 Transport Rules in general see:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj919238(v=exchg.150).aspx
In this case I am going to set a rule to encrypt messages sent to one person in the organisation (Anne Wallace).
To see the encryption options ensure you select the More options hyperlink at the bottom of this window as shown above.
For the Do the following condition select Modify the message security and then Apply Office 365 Message Encryption as shown above.
Once saved the new rule should appear in the list as shown above.
Now if Anne Wallace is sent an email by another Office 365 she will see:
Indicating that this is an encrypted message.
To view the message Anne must save the attached HTML file to her local machine and open it.
When she so and opens it she will see the above message.
If she then selects the Sign in and view encrypted message hyperlink she will be see the encrypted message.
Exchange Online Encrypted messages work with people inside and outside Office 365. If you want more information check out the following:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn569286.aspx
Once you have done the initial Rights Management setup you then have a lot of flexibility using Exchange Online Transport Rules to determine how messages are handled. You could set up a rule that if the word ENCRYPT is in the message subject it will always be encrypted.
Very flexible and most importantly, very secure.
Office 365 now supports the ability to attach files directly from your OneDrive for Business via Outlook Web Access.
To do this simply navigate to your Office 365 web portal and select Outlook from the top navigation bar.
Compose a new email and select the Insert button at the top of the window. That will reveal the above menu. Select Attachments or OneDrive for files.
You’ll then be taken to a screen like the above where you can select from a number of different sources. Under the OneDrive option for example select My Files. You should then see all the files you have in OneDrive for Business displayed. Select the file you wish to attach and then the Next option in the top left (above the OneDrive icon).
You are then prompted as to whether you wish to send this file as an attachment (i.e. the whole file is added to the email) or you just want to send a link to the file. In essence this ‘shares’ that file from your OneDrive for Business rather than sending the whole file. That allows you to potentially revoke that sharing at any stage in the future.
If you elect to attach the file you will see the attachment displayed as above with the actual file size displayed.
If instead you elected to Share with OneDrive you will see the attachment but also the text Recipients can edit.
When the recipient receives the file, if it was sent as an attachment they can view it as they normally could.
However, if you elected to Share with OneDrive they will be taken to a link to view the file. If the shared file is an Office document they will see that document in Office Online as shown above.
This feature is something that has been missing from Office 365 for a while now and makes more sense as more people move all their information to the cloud. What would be nice now is some similar integration with Outlook on the desktop. Having the ability to attach or share from Outlook on a standard PC desktop would really accelerate cloud adoption in my option.
This feature is currently rolling out to all tenants. If you don’t have it yet you will soon.
Office 365 provides the ability in all plans to search across all mailboxes. What I’ll cover here is how to do this with the Small Business Plan as that is the most challenging given that Exchange Online console is not exposed by default. If you have an M or E plan simply follow on from when the Exchange Online console comes into view.
The above screen shot shows a user with a single email in their inbox we will search for. In this case we will be searching for the text “Rescuetime”.
Login into the Office 365 portal as a tenant administrator.
Here we have logged into a Small Business tenant which provides a simplified interface. To access the Exchange Online console from a Small Business tenant use the URL:
https://outlook.office365.com/ecp/
When the Exchange Online console appears select permissions from the left hand side.
By default no user is given the ability to search through all mailboxes, not even global administrators. So the first step in the process is therefore to allow this.
Once permissions is selected, select Discovery management to the right as shown above.
Now select the pen icon at the top to edit this security group.
At the bottom of the dialog that appears, in the Members section, press the + button to add a new member.
Select and add the Office 365 users you wish to give these discovery rights to.
Press Save to update the permissions.
You may need to log out of the web portal and log back in. You may also need to wait a few minutes until the rights have been updated.
Once you have select compliance management from the menu on the left.
Unless you see more than 4 icons at the top of the table you do not have the discovery rights.
Only when you do will you see all the icons as shown directly above will you have the rights to search across multiple content.
Press the + key to create a new search.
Give the new discovery search a name and description and select next to continue.
In most cases you are going to want to search all mailboxes, however it is possible to specify which ones you wish to search.
Press the next button when you have made your selection.
Now you can specific the filter criteria for your search. In this case we need to search for the keyword ‘Rescuetime’.
Press the finish button when complete.
The search will execute immediately. The time taken will depend on the information your are searching for and how much information it has to search.
Press the close button to continue.
You should now see the item just created listed.
If you scroll down the dialog on the right you will see a hyperlink Preview search results. Select this.
You will now see an Outlook Web Access style interface with all the matches located.
With the item selected you can also use the download button to save the results to a PST file for offline review.
You can of course return to this query at any point in the future, edit the query and save it to re-run the search. This makes it very handy if you need to search for things on a regular basis.
In summary, all plans have the ability to search across your users data (in this case email). Some plans also allow you to place searched information on hold so that it is retained even if deleted by the user. You will firstly need to grant the person doing the searching the rights as a member of the Discovery Management group. You then create a query based on your requirements which you can view online or export to a PST file for offline view.
You’ll find more detailed information about these discovery options at:
If your Office 365 plan includes the option for litigation hold then it is generally best to turn it on for all mailboxes from day 1. The quickest and easiest method of doing that is via PowerShell.
Here’s the one line command you need to achieve that:
get-mailbox | set –litigationholdenabled $true
Of course, it won’t automatically enable any future mailboxes your create but all you need to do is run the same command again.
CIAOPS 