How to set up Microsoft 365 archive policy

With thousands of emails exchanged every day even in a single medium-sized organization, user’s mailboxes might quickly get full. In Exchange Online, you can try to overcome this problem by enabling archive mailboxes and telling users to move old items to them. Unfortunately, the human factor can be the weak link in the process. This is where Microsoft 365 archive policies come into play, offering you a centralized and automated way to keep your users’ primary mailboxes below the cap.

Archive policy configuration in Microsoft 365 (Office 365)
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All about sensitivity labels in Exchange Online

[Update]: This blog post was first published on December 13, 2021. It was updated to reflect UI changes in the Microsoft Purview compliance portal (Microsoft 365 compliance center) and show new features, like inheriting a higher priority sensitivity label from email attachments.

Microsoft 365 admins have many tools they can use to secure documents and emails. One of those tools is a sensitivity label. I’ll explain in detail what a sensitivity label is, how to set it up and test if it works well.

Sensitivity labels in Microsoft 365
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What is Microsoft Viva and how to configure it part #2: Viva Engage, Goals, and Sales

Microsoft Viva was launched on February 4, 2021 and has been constantly evolving ever since. In this article, I discussed configuration of the first 4 Viva apps (Connections, Insights, Learning, and Topics) from a Microsoft 365 admin perspective. Since that time, Microsoft has launched 3 new ones: Engage, Goals, and Sales, which I’m going to present to you this time.

Improve employee experience with Viva Engage, Goals, and Sales
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Persistently Vulnerable Exchange Servers: prepare for email throttling & blocking

Microsoft plans to throttle and even block emails sent from Exchange Server to Exchange Online. The transport-based enforcement system will report emails sent from vulnerable Exchange Servers and gradually delay and block mail flow to force admins to update their on-prem environments. This is to ensure superior security of Microsoft 365 organizations. See if the new feature affects you and what you can do to keep your mail flow running.

Transport-based enforcement system blocks emails from persistently vulnerable Exchange servers
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How to set up out of office replies in Office 365

[Update]: This blog post was updated on September 5, 2023.

Out of office messages in Office 365 (let’s assume Office 365 = Microsoft 365, to make things easier) are an extremely useful thing. Not everyone knows though that this simple automatic reply is more than just an email. In this article, I’ll quickly go over the basics: what out of office message in Office 365 is and how to set it up for your account. For the real treat, I’ll show the easiest way to set up an out of office reply for another user (or all users).

Out of office in Office 365
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How to block access to your Exchange Online organization using Client Access Rules

[Update] This post was updated on June 22, 2023 because of the plans to deprecate Client Access Rules in Exchange Online.

Client Access Rules (or CARs) in Exchange Online are rules that you can use to control which client connections are allowed and not allowed to access your Exchange Online organization. They let you define the conditions based on various properties of a client. These can be, for example, the protocol they use to connect, their IP address or an Active Directory attribute. Thanks to that, you have an option to block (or allow) certain client connections to better protect your Microsoft 365 (Office 365) organization.

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What is the archive mailbox in Exchange?

Archive mailboxes are the solution to the problem of limited data storage space in both on-premises and cloud Exchange. This concept, while not new, is somewhat unclear (partly to a number of names used to refer to it in Exchange documentation), even to people using Exchange email on a daily basis. Read on to leave your confusion behind and become an expert on email archiving in Exchange.

Your guide to email archiving in Office 365 and Exchange Server.
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End of life for basic authentication in Office 365 (Microsoft 365)

[Update]: The article was originally published on September 24, 2020, when basic authentication’s end of life was still in planning phase.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, there was a huge change of plans concerning disabling basic authentication in Microsoft 365 (for connections to Exchange Online). After multiple changes in the timeline, basic authentication almost reached its end of life. Continue reading this article to learn more about basic authentication in Microsoft 365, where you can still find it, how to block it on your own and when exactly it will be disabled.

Disable basic authentication office 365
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