Earlier this year, Microsoft changed how voicemail worked for Skype for Business on-premises customers. There was little difference to end users when Unified Messaging changed to Cloud Voicemail, but it did break a few Auto Attendant options for those not in the cloud.
At the time I remember it being rather difficult to find out information on, and the good contacts I had at vendors also struggled to gather intel on how the change would go.
In the end, the migration happened and it was thankfully a non-event. What I didn’t realise at the time, was that it introduced a new portal for Voicemail settings at https://admin1.online.lync.com/lscp/usp/voicemail (which has slight variations where you are in the world, for Australia it’s https://admin1au.online.lync.com/lscp/usp/voicemail – but the links seem to redirect to where they need to go) and there’s a few interesting settings:
The Call Answer Rules section (Choose how you want your calls to be handled when they reach the voicemail service) lets you pick what happens when someone hears your voicemail, including the last option ‘Play greeting, then allow the caller to recording a message or transfer to the target user’. If you set this, you can then enter the number you want calls to go to if someone does press ‘0’ – such as Reception, or your mobile phone. The default setting is ‘Play greeting, then allow the caller to record a message’.
The Prompt Language section (Changing this setting will change the greeting prompt language) will change the language and accent of the greeting – so if you’d like them to sound Australian, you can choose that.
The Configure Out of Office greeting section (Customize an Out of Office greeting message, and choose to play it to callers all the time, based on your Outlook auto-reply status, or calendar OOF status) was the one I liked the most. It can sync with your mailbox to know when you’re Out of Office via your current Outlook status (either with an autoreply, or just in a meeting with the status ‘Out of Office’), and when true, give a different message to the caller saying you’re out of the office.
There’s also another option Text-to-Speech Customized Greeting Option (Customize your Text-to-speech greeting message) that lets you customise the generic Out of Office greeting to whatever you like. Although you can only type your greeting message, the text-to-speech works really well and sounds natural.
To me, this is great. I can set a generic ‘I’m out of the office, please call X on this number’ which only plays when I’m actually out of the office. If I’m not, then a caller will hear my standard greeting and can leave a message, instead of hassling co-workers. I don’t have to remember to set it or change it, it just applies if I do the right thing in my Outlook calendar.
If you’ve got Cloud Voicemail; which you should if you’re on Skype for Business, Skype for Business Online, or Microsoft Teams as your phone system, check it out and save yourself some time from changing your voicemail when you go on leave, or just have a meeting when you’re not around.
Microsoft Lists is available for a lot of people already, and should be globally available by the end of October 2020. Users can start using it as soon as it’s released for your tenant, which is great; but you might get caught out by the same date and time regional problem I did.
Creating a List is easy (right now I have the option available in Teams, but the app in Office 365 hasn’t turned up yet), and there’s many use cases for wanting a date or time field.
However, the suggestion on what day it is was wrong:
Today is actually Wednesday, October 14th 2020. It’s being caused because the timezone is wrong for the list. How do we fix that?
A Microsoft List can be created two ways – in the single user context, or in a Microsoft 365 Group context. If you’re doing in in Teams then the later only applies. Individually, it’s saved in the same area as your OneDrive for Business (which is backeneded by SharePoint), but for a Group it’s saved straight into the Site for the Group.
Lists in OneDrive for Business
For the individual point of view, there’s already a Microsoft Answer on how to fix this – change your Time Zone and Region Locale. The link for this is indivualised for your tenant and account, but you can access it by:
Click the cog in the top right corner and choose ‘OneDrive Settings’
Click ‘More Settings’ in the left hand list
Under ‘Region and Language’ choose ‘Regional Settings’
Choose the correct Time Zone and Locale for your account
Changing this for all users is a bit more of a problem. There’s a PowerShell script here to update all existing ones, and new users there appears to be no way to do it based on this outstanding UserVoice – if you find anything different, please share and I’ll update this post.
Lists in SharePoint Online
A Microsoft List tied to a Microsoft 365 Group will read the Time Zone and Region settings from the Group’s site, which is accessed a bit differently:
If you have the Lists app in the left hand menu, choose that and skip to step 5
If there is no Lists app, click the SharePoint app from the left hand menu
Choose the Microsoft 365 Group that contains the Microsoft List (if you’re unsure, you can try finding the List in Teams, clicking the elipsis and choosing ‘Open in SharePoint’.
Click the cog in the top right corner and choose ‘Site Contents’ then choose ‘Site Settings’
Click ‘Regional Settings’ under ‘Site Administration’
Choose the correct Time Zone and Locale for your Group and press ‘OK’ in the bottom right corner.
This works for a single site, but what about a company wide default?
In the SharePoint admin center, under Settings then Site creation, you can set the default time zone for new sites. This won’t help any existing Microsoft 365 Group already created (as a site is created at the time the group gets created), but will help with future sites.
If you want to update existing sites in PowerShell, you’ll need to start with this command:
A lot of details there just to change the date detection in Lists, but hopefully this gives you enough information to understand the scenarios and how to resolve them.
Was stumpted on this one and had to get advice from Microsoft Support.
A single user couldn’t log in via Multi-Factor Authentication. SMS code would say it was sent, wouldn’t come through. Phone call also wouldn’t come through. Trying to set up another MFA method aka.ms/mfasetup would receive one of these errors:
You are blocked from performing this operation. Please contact your administrator for help.
We’re sorry, we ran into a problem. Please select “Next to try again.
There were zero search results for that first error word for word, which is never a good sign.
There’s several areas you can check for blocked users such as:
And of course, that’s where the user was listed. They’d had some suspicious activity (a MFA phone call they didn’t initiate) so chose the option to block future sign in attempts, as you’d hope. This also triggered an email alert to admins, and that link is where the user’s block is listed until released.
Microsoft Editor is a new tool from Microsoft, which I’d never heard of before.
Funnily enough, I found out that Microsoft Editor existed after upgrading to Windows 10 2004. One of the fifteen tips when you ‘See what else is new in this update’ after upgrading is this tip below. I couldn’t really understand what application the tip was referring to – the home tab, in Word, in browser mode via Edge?
Although I then found other tips that seemed purely Office 365 related (like PowerPoint and Excel tips) which is strange to advertise as part of a Windows 10 upgrade, the button on this tip takes you to a page that does a much better job of explaining what it is:
Here it explains that Microsoft Editor (which the full name wasn’t mentioned in the tip!) is an optional add-in available for Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome. It’s also coming to Word and Outlook. Also, if you log into it with an account that has a Microsoft 365 subscription, you’ll get advanced grammar and style refinements.
Once installed, you’ll have this little icon in the top bar of the relevant browser:
Clicking it will ask you to sign in:
and you can sign in with a free consumer Microsoft account, or a Work account. After signing in, the icon will turn blue, and you can click it again to see your options.
Note that it uses English (United States) as the default language, which you can change by clicking on the current language which takes you to the options:
‘Show synonyms for spelling suggestions’ is also off by default, so I’ve turned that on.
Here’s a spelling correction and a grammar correction while writing this blog post:
Spelling correction
Grammar correction
I’ll have to use it more to see how good it is, but I am happy to see hopefully a useful tool to help everyone write better. If it’s being added into Word and Outlook, there’ll be extremely elevated expectations of this solution doing its job well!
Synology sent me a new DiskStation to review after I’d acquired an older one myself to look at it’s ability to back up Microsoft 365 data (the updated name for Office 365). Being a Microsoft MVP in Office Apps and Services category, so I was very interested to see how it worked.
After reading up on and seeing that it was a completely free piece of software available as part of owning a DiskStation, I was hoping this would be a good solution at an incredibly low price – buy your DiskStation and disks, some time to set it up, and you’re done. To me, that’s already a very appealing offering, along with Synology having a good reputation for maintaining and supporting their hardware several years on – which was proved by the 7 year old DS1813+ I set up a few months ago.
I’ve left the new Intel-based DiskStation 1618+ – Quad Core CPU and 4GB RAM (expandable) running for about a month now, backing up my Microsoft 365 tenant’s data. I ticked ALL the options to see how it went. This tenant is just for me, so the data set is smaller than most tenants – but I do run a few live things through it like email and OneDrive. There’s also a little SharePoint Online data from Micrsoft 365 Groups and Teams I’ve played around with.
Here’s what the dashboard looks like now:
Some useful information there around what’s being backed up and how big it is. You might notice there’s a few errors on the summary. I drilled into those and each was because ‘The Microsoft Server is busy’, and a few minutes later it would try again successfully.
This is likely because I used a backup option to get incremental changes, rather than at a set time. Maybe I’m hitting it too much and getting blocked occasionally.
I know I’ve gotten ahead of myself here, so let’s go back to how to set this up. Assuming you have yourself a Synology DiskStation of some sort that supports ‘Active Backup for Office 365‘ – and which models are those? Here’s the list:
From the DiskStation desktop, open Package Center and follow these steps:
Find and click ‘install’ on the ‘Active Backup for Office 365’ package
Click ‘Activate’
Click ‘OK’
Choose the endpoint – for most it’s the default ‘Office 365’ option
Accept the very long list of permissions required using an admin account for your Microsoft 365 tenant
‘Agree’
You need a shared folder to save the backups to – ‘Go to Control Panel’
Enter a name and description for the shared folder
Encypt the data if you like
‘Next’
Make any user permission changes you like and press ‘OK’
Again choose the Office 365 option applicable to your tenant
Pick the user(s) you want to back up, and what data
Choose the ‘Site’ tab to select which SharePoint sites you want to back up
Press ‘OK’
Choose your backup schedule – I used Continuous
Review all the settings and click ‘Apply’
This was a very easy setup to do – I took screenshots of every step involved, but it barely needs an explanation for anyone who’s an admin of a Microsoft 365 Tenant.
The program will then go off and start backing up what you told it. The ‘Activities’ section of Active Backup for Office 365 will show any backups running, and you can also use the inbuilt ‘Resource Monitor’ to see upload/download speeds, disk utilization etc.
It’s also worth noting that the backup you created has an ‘account discovery’ option where it’ll find any new accounts created and automatically add them to the backup, which is great for not having to change backup settings each time you have a new user start.
Running a backup is great, but how do you restore the data? There’s a second app you’ll need, ‘Active Backup for Office 365 Portal’. Launching this will take you to a web interface where admins can browse all data, and users can browse just their own (user access can be disabled if you prefer).
On this web interface, you can then find the file(s) you want to restore, and restore them. You also get a nice timeline down the bottom so you can move backwards and forwards to see a snapshot of a certain time.
Although Mail, Calendar, Contact, and Site (SharePoint) support searching across all backups for names and contents, at the time of writing this isn’t possible for OneDrive backups. It’s worth being aware of this – if someone requests a file restore you’ll need to know exactly when from. I don’t see this as too much of an issue though, as OneDrive has great version control natively, and an automatic recycle bin – so you’d probably rely on the native solution for finding a file, but still it’s worth knowing this existing limitation.
That was the only slight negative I could find while testing. Everything else just worked, was quick to browse and restore, and incremental backups appeared to be on the DiskStation within several seconds after creating a new file in OneDrive.
Again, this is an incredibly cheap Office 365 backup solution. Some may question if you need to back up Office 365 at all. You could set up infinite retention against all content, so why take a backup? To me it’s a definite grey area, and partly depends how much you value the data. Microsoft may never lose your data, but will it be available 100% of the time? What if that important document is in your OneDrive and hadn’t synced down, and there was an outage? We’ve seen a few outages lately, including ones that have broken authentication – your data is still there, but you can’t get to it. In that scenario, having a local copy of something time sensitive could be worth it. Considering the relative low cost of buying a Synolgoy DiskStation – your disks are probably going to cost more than the unit itself, I consider it a pretty easy sell.
