Dave Stork MSc’s Post

A really clear explanation of the future for Microsoft Outlook. If you've not started testing new Outlook then start now as the clock is ticking! If you use Com Addins you need to start pressing your providers to modernise. They are probably the only thing really standing in your way. Cameron Dwyer makes a great point in his post about the lack of investment so don't be surprised if you get push back. "I feel this area has been under resourced by Microsoft and needs investment quickly in order to open the opportunity for more feature rich Web Add-ins to be built, unlocking that barrier to being able to build equivalent Web Add-ins thus allowing enterprise to switch across to using New Outlook for Windows." The more customers push their suppliers and the more they push Microsoft the sooner the we can all move forward. In terms of cutover, new Outlook's key quality is a return to its roots and the fundamentals of email and calendar. The years of feature bloat have been pushed to the background or cleared away entirely. This vastly simplifies it's purpose and the what to use when across the M365 communication and collaboration apps. The client is faster, lighter, easier to use and from a feature perspective they'll be able to move much faster. With offline access rolling out, my view is that the product is ready for General Availability later this year. What are you waiting for?

If you’re using legacy Outlook it’s time to change. It’s starting to lose functionality and will be phased out by the end of August. Get in touch if we can help update your business to New Outlook #Microsoft #Outlook #NewOutlook

"Users may be unable to access some Microsoft 365 Apps when authenticating with MFA," Microsoft said in an incident alert published in the admin center.

Microsoft is investigating a widespread and ongoing Microsoft 365 outage impacting Office web apps and the Microsoft 365 admin center. Since this incident started hours ago, Downdetector has received user reports complaining about problems connecting to Outlook, OneDrive, and other Office 365 apps and services.

Oof, that's not good. You can't not have MFA anymore (unless you've got other IAM tech, like digital certs, etc. to also authenticate). MFA is your people-firewall.

If you're using legacy Outlook it's time to change. It's starting to lose functionality and will be phased out by the end of August. Get in touch if we can help update your business to New Outlook #Microsoft #Outlook #NewOutlook

Microsoft is investigating a widespread and ongoing Microsoft 365 outage impacting Office web apps and the Microsoft 365 admin center. Since this incident started hours ago, Downdetector has received user reports complaining about problems connecting to Outlook, OneDrive, and other Office 365 apps and services. Affected customers see "We're experiencing a service outage. All of your open files have been saved. It may be some time before the outage is resolved." messages when trying to view or access their Microsoft 365 apps using a web browser. #noble1 TOM SHAW

i've been using outlook.com for my personal calendar, because i was running windows on my personal laptop, and i have 25+ years of experience with the native Outlook app for windows. importantly, the EWS protocol is spoken by many clients and so i've been able to share access toward my family even though they aren't running windows or Outlook. several things have changed. microsoft has announced that "basic auth" is no longer going to be permitted after september 16, we all have to switch to "modern auth" which seems to mean oauth2. i've been advised to switch to the new Outlook client, which is an Electron app, and which i despise. my family's iPhones can't access my calendar using anything but basic auth. also, windows 10 has been EOL'd, and i'm urged to upgrade to windows 11, which my laptop doesn't support, and whose security philosophy i fear. i thought to just move my personal calendar to iCloud, but then i rediscovered that unless you're accessing that calendar from inside apple's ecosystem, it will be read-only. i just need to store it and share it; i'll edit it from many clients not just apple apps or the icloud web app. i don't want to be a second class citizen to my own calendar! i thought to move to google, but then i remembered that about five or ten years ago google announced that they would begin to actually delete messages from gmail when a user hit the "delete" button. up until that point google had been retaining "deleted" messages for their own purposes. i won't put any sensitive data (like who my friends are) where google can see. since i'm switching from windows 10 to suse leap 15.6, and since KDE PIM is working fantastically well for me (as is Wayland), i looked for a self-hosted or online calendar that "korganizer" was compatible with. kolabnow is down, so an obvious non-candidate. etesync wouldn't start up on my iPhone, so another non-candidate. eventually i found mailbox.org, which uses "caldav". mailbox.org is hosted in Germany, whose national privacy laws i know well. KDE PIM (korganizer), and my iPhone both interact well with it. i'm struggling with my Android phone because caldav isn't native and i need to pick a "caldav sync" app but i'm getting good vibes so far. i currently expect to buy an annual subscription for $2/month or maybe $4/month.

"Microsoft is investigating a widespread and ongoing Microsoft 365 outage impacting Office web apps and the Microsoft 365 admin center. Since this incident started hours ago, Downdetector has received user reports complaining about problems connecting to Outlook, OneDrive, and other Office 365 apps and services. Affected customers see "We're experiencing a service outage. All of your open files have been saved. It may be some time before the outage is resolved." messages when trying to view or access their Microsoft 365 apps using a web browser."

As a follow up to my last post about Windows 10 end of support being less than a year away, there are some other major changes coming to the productivity suite with Office and Skype 2016 and 2019 and Exchange Server 2019 all facing end of support in 2025. This article goes into greater detail, but the last few lines stick out the most, "You have to wonder how organizations are going to manage all this change. Hopefully, they've budgeted for it and prepared for it, and they've got contractors and developers on deck to make it all happen. But if not, they'd better hustle." Now is the time to be understanding your options and deciding on the go forward plan. This is where our team at Converge Technology Solutions Corp. comes in - we can provide a *FREE* licensing assessment of your environment that is going to help right size the costs of your current Microsoft licensing and help identify the best way forward based on your specific needs. Our AIM approach (Advise, Implement and Manage) ensures that you have a partner with you through every step of this process, helping to control cost, mitigate risk, and increase productivity. We have a large team of technical resources and specialists ready to help ensure that all this work gets done well ahead of these impending deadlines. We understand the TCO on this, and it doesn't pay to wait! Reach out to me to learn more and get the conversation started.