Continuous access evaluation on by default!

You may have seen an email this week from #Microsoft advising that beginning on June 15th 2021 they will enable Continuous Access Evaluation on Premium Azure AD tenants by default. Your #MicrosoftCloudQuickFix today is that this is a GOOD thing and you will want this capability!

Continuous Access Evaluation will only be active in sessions betweenΒ clients and services that support it which for now are Exchange, Teams, and SharePoint Online. When enabled in your tenant critical events, such as disabling users and resetting passwords, and critical policies like location policy, will take effect within minutes!

You can disable this feature before June 15th 2021 if you don’t want to use it but the best example why you want this enabled is:

When a user is terminated and their mailbox is in Exchange Online they will still have access to their mailbox on their devices for some time after unless there are specific steps taken by the Exchange Admin because the access token on the device is still valid. Continuous Access Evaluation would notice that the user has be disabled and nearly synchronously disable the access by rejecting the token even though it is still valid.

More information for Continuous Access Evaluation can found on #Microsoft Docs.

Update to Exchange Online Reply-All Storm Protection

Your #MicrosoftCloudQuickFix is that #Microsoft has announced some important updates to the #ExchangeOnline Reply-All Storm Protection settings to roll-out by mid June 2021.

Reply-all Storm Protection helps protect your organization from unwanted reply-all storms which could disrupt your email services and in some cases throttle the rest of your organization’s email!

#Microsoft has announced the ability to customize these setting specifically to your organizations needs inside your #Microsoft365 Tenant. Administrators will have the flexibility to enable/disable the feature, and set customized detection thresholds and block duration time allowing smaller organizations to take advantage of Reply-all Storm Protection.

Check out the Exchange Team Blog for more details!

Microsoft Teams Webinars Rolling out in May 2021

An exciting update for today’s #MicrosoftCloudQuickFix – #Microsoft has begun the rollout of the #MicrosoftTeams webinars capability.

With this update, when scheduling a meeting, you will see the Webinar option on the Calendar drop down menu in the #MicrosoftTeams interface (desktop/web).

Look for this to appear in #MicrosoftTeams by end of May 2021 and be free to use for the rest of 2021!

Set out of office within Microsoft Teams

Today’s #MicrosoftCloudQuickFix is that starting shortly #Microsoft will begin the rollout of the “Set out of office within #MicrosoftTeams” capability.

With this update, you can create an out of office message from within Microsoft Teams desktop or Microsoft Teams on the web and the message will sync across your Outlook calendar, presence, and contact card information!

Look for this to appear in #MicrosoftTeams in May 2021!

March 2021 Quarterly Exchange Updates

Your #MicrosoftCloudQuickFix is a friendly reminder to patch your on-premises #MicrosoftExchange Servers! #Microsoft has released cumulative updates for Exchange Server which include the fixes that were released earlier this month in response to the zero-day vulnerabilities for Microsoft Exchange Server that are being actively exploited.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/released-march-2021-quarterly-exchange-updates/ba-p/2205283

Decommission your on-premises Exchange servers?

I had a customer ask if after they were done migrating all their mailboxes and services from their local on-premises Exchange Server to Exchange Online if they could remove their local Exchange server. You certainly cant blame them for wanting to with the recent news of zero-day vulnerabilities for Microsoft Exchange Server that are being actively exploited and that Exchange Online was not at risk.

I remembered a great article posted a few years back by Paul Cunningham on Practical365.com and in it the following:

“If you have directory synchronization in place, then you need to manage the mail attributes of users, groups, and contacts in the on-premises Active Directory, and then allow those changes to synchronize to Azure Active Directory. The only π˜€π˜‚π—½π—½π—Όπ—Ώπ˜π—²π—± way to manage the mail attributes on-premises is using the Exchange management tools, which requires at least one Exchange server to be running.”

https://bit.ly/38HYltb

The key word is π˜€π˜‚π—½π—½π—Όπ—Ώπ˜π—²π—± and sadly no new updates from Microsoft have come since 2017 so for now the answer is no you must keep at least one Exchange Server on-premises and this has been your #MicrosoftCloudQuickFix