If you know, you know. In the memory of Frank Costanza, let us air some grievances. Since this is a newsletter about M365, I’ve got a few problems with Microsoft. ;-)
One thing that had me rolling my eyes in the last couple of weeks was something that came up when researching the new feature that lets users forward chat messages.
First, some background. In the past, I’ve worked with some highly regulated organizations who’ve had to limit what their users could do within meetings. Usually, they did this by blocking recording so that there is no transcript of likely very sensitive information and by blocking chat so that sensitive information would not be available to be copied or forwarded with this new feature.
Microsoft saw this possibility and introduced a setting that prevented copying or forwarding chat messages from within a meeting. That made sense. Unfortunately, the feature is only available in Teams Premium.
This seems to be coming up a lot recently. We already spent an entire issue discussing the difficulty of eDiscovery without upgrading to an e5 license. The add-on cost for Microsoft’s Copilot for 365 is quite prohibitive. We are seeing features dropped behind the “Premium” firewalls for Teams, SharePoint, Planner, etc., which some might consider core requirements for some organizations.
Which makes me wonder. How complicated is it to calculate the Total Cost of Ownership for M365 as they continue to add more “add-on” costs for new features? You own it. You’ve licensed all of your users and identified the features you need to work, and then MS comes to you with AI features like meeting recaps or Copilot for writing documents, but those aren’t included. You’ll need to consider Teams Premium and a significant investment in CoPilot.
Microsoft and Wall Street are counting on us to fork over the extra cash, but how many of us will continue to do that? How many new things can they come up with that customers will continue to add to their budgets to purchase?
I guess we’ll find out.
Elsewhere:
Speaking of Teams meetings, this is a good overview of some settings to consider - Enabling and Securing Microsoft Teams Meeting Data Retention at Microsoft.
I’m interested to see how the new Planner rolls out myself:
This could have some interesting eDiscovery challenges, especially around tracking what meetings someone had on their calendar and whether they saw the meeting chat - Preserve Declined Meetings with Outlook.
Speaking of some interesting eDiscovery testing, this feature that allows users to archive Teams channels might have some interesting impacts on eDiscovery. Or it may not. We’ll see in February.
A new app that may have some eDiscovery impacts, but I know it does have some potential for those of us who want to encourage more asynchronous communication in the workplace -The Updates App.
There are a few - The Ultimate Guide to Microsoft Task Management Apps.
Tony Redmond wrote a post describing something I’ve also described in a previous newsletter. Still, it never hurts to see such a complicated subject covered differently - How the Auto-label Policy for Cloudy Attachments Works.
Finally, thanks to Ryan John Murphy, who shared links to the various Ninja trainings for Purview on his LinkedIn post last week. I am bookmarking that one for myself and sharing it with you.
Due to the upcoming holidays, issues will be coming out on Tuesday mornings instead of Monday for the next two weeks. They will await you if you take more time than just Christmas Day and New Year’s Day away from your email. Either way, enjoy the holidays and stay safe. I’ll be back next week with another deep dive into the eDiscovery ramifications of M365 changes!
Also, don’t forget that you can share the newsletter and get yourself a free subscription. (Or qualify for a free subscription, get in touch if I can be of assistance this time of year to you or your team.)