If you own the E5 license within Microsoft Office 365, you may be wondering how to take advantage of all the features that you have purchased.

One of these features is called Advanced eDiscovery. This comes from an acquisition of a company called Equivio, that had specialized machine learning technology to reduce the time and costs for eDiscovery between 75% to 90%.

Equivio was designed to solve a problem where you have a million documents to analyze to determine whether they are relevant to a legal case. When dealing with large, unstructured data sets, this tool can be quite effective to reduce the total number of documents that need to be reviewed by a human.

In my opinion, this tool should be used in cases where you have a LOT of search results that come back from the initial search query. Otherwise, if you only have a handful of documents that are returned, it is not necessary to use this advanced tool since you don’t have the problem that the tool was designed to solve.

What data can it search?

Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Skype for Business.

How does it work?

One of the features of Equivio is the use of ‘predictive coding’ which is a technique of watching how you tag documents as relevant to the case or not relevant on a small subset of search results, and then the machine learning algorithm can use this to filter out noise and reduce the total number of documents that truly need to be reviewed. In one case, defendants were able to reduce the number of documents that had to be reviewed by humans from 2 million documents to just 10 percent of that original number. Imagine the cost savings in legal fees!

The software also identifies duplicate files and email threads, which further reduces the costs involved in analyzing search results.

How do I find Advanced eDiscovery in Office 365?

At the time of this writing, Equivio Analytics (now dubbed Advanced eDiscovery) can be found in the Office 365 Compliance Center here:
https://compliance.protection.outlook.com

Then on the left navigation pane click eDiscovery. In the middle pane click ‘Go to Equivio Analytics.’ (as shown in screen shot below).

The first time you browse there, you will be prompted to submit a request to enable Equivio, and that it could take up to 24 hours for this to take effect.

In the future, this will be moved to the new Protection Center here:https://protection.office.com but at the time of this writing, Equivio is not yet accessible in the new Protection Center portal, so just use the existing Compliance Center for now.

Note: Before you get started, you need permissions. To access the eDiscovery cases page in the Compliance Center, you have to be a member of the eDiscovery Manager role group in the Compliance Center. For more information about permissions, see Permissions in the Office 365 Compliance Center.

In my next blog article, I will show you the user interface and integration with the Compliance Center. Click (here) for part 2 in this series.

Need help with your next Office 365 Project? Contact us at [email protected]

Your Office 365 Outlook connection will do a DNS lookup and Microsoft will use the GEO location of that lookup to connect you to your ‘nearest’ Microsoft Data-center. Outlook will connect to an Exchange CAS server based on the DNS query and use Microsoft’s fast Data-center to data-center backbone network to connect you to the data-center where your Exchange mailbox data is located. Generally, this works well, however, you may not always under all circumstances be connected to the closest data-center.

For example, from my network in Southern California, I was connecting to an Exchange CAS server in Asia Pacific!

Using the picture below, consider a case in an enterprise where users that will use Office365 are located in Dallas TX (BLUE), and an Office365 Tenant has been setup for them in the San Antonio data center (PURPLE).

However, all traffic external to the organization goes from Dallas to Phoenix (RED), on a private connection, before reaching the Internet.

Users in Dallas, when doing DNS lookups for hosts on the Internet end up using DNS servers in Phoenix (because that is where data leaves the company network).

Users in Dallas will receive IP addresses of the nearest Office365 data center as San Jose (ORANGE).  From there, the data travels all the way back to San Antonio (PURPLE) where the Tenant is hosted.

Problem

If the internal DNS servers are not adjusted to point “outlook.office365.com” to the San Antonio data center (PURPLE), users will have a horrible experience due to the many network hops and latency in between. 

For more information see http://blogs.technet.com/b/onthewire/archive/2014/06/27/dns-geolocation-for-office-365-connecting-you-to-your-nearest-datacenter.aspx

Solution

Changing the DNS servers will cause Dallas users to jump directly to the truly “nearest” Office365 data center.

Credits go to PRIASOFT for all of the above information.

Caveats

If you update your local DNS to force traffic to a particular data center, make sure to periodically check to see if Microsoft updates their DNS. Every organization will need to weigh the benefits of the speed increase with the overhead of having to maintain local DNS records from outlook.office365.com.

Free Download of tool to determine your closest MSFT Data Center based on TCP ping, courtesy of PRIASOFT.

Need help with your next Office 365 Project? Contact us at [email protected]

To activate the new E5 feature “Delve Analytics”, the Office 365 administrator must follow these steps:

1. Browse to the Office 365 admin center.
http://portal.office.com

2. Enable First Release. It can take up to 24 hours for the changes to take effect in Office 365.
b. After you enable First Release, click the Admin tile in the Office 365 admin center.
c. Click the link in the Ribbon on the top of the page “New Admin Center in the works – get a sneak peek” to use the Admin center preview.

3. In the Admin center preview, click the gear icon on the left side of the page to open the Settings menu and then click Apps.

4. On the Apps page, locate the Delve Analytics section and click Submit below the text “Submit a request to enable Delve Analytics for your organization“.

5. Wait for approval.

To see what it looks like after approval, click (here) to take a peak.

Need help with your next Office 365 Project? We can help you deploy any or all of the 21 features Included in Office 365 for a flat rate per month.  Contact us at [email protected].

Mandatory Anonymous Link Expiration is a new feature for SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. This feature started rolling out January 12th, 2016, and is scheduled to complete in the coming weeks.

With this feature, administrators can now set a mandatory expiration length for all anonymous links created in their company to help promote security and link hygiene. End users will be required to create links that match or are shorter than the stated expiration value.

There is no default value for anonymous link expiration. To begin using this feature, use the SharePoint Online Management Shell using the “RequireAnonymousLinksExpireInDays” parameter.

As an example, this will set expiry for 30 days:
Set-SPOTenant –RequireAnonymousLinksExpireInDays 30

This feature strikes the balance between productivity and security, allowing users to easily share content, while preventing shared content from endlessly being shared with potentially unauthorized people (for example, after a person leaves an organization, if they had a copy of an anonymous link, at least those can now expire).

On December 16th, Microsoft announced (here) the availability of the highly anticipated “Next Generation Sync Client (NGSC)” [for OneDrive for Business].

I have been beta testing the new client for months and it is super fast (4x) the speed of the old sync client. It has resolved most of the pain points of the original sync client based on the Groove engine (also previously known as SharePoint Workspace).

After reading through the release notes (here) and (here) I can state that most large companies should wait until April of 2016 before considering a large scale deployment of the NGSC to their enterprise. However, IT Departments can begin evaluating the NGSC now in preparation for a deployment in April.

Why wait until April, you may ask? First, if your organization has any Windows 8.1 devices, they have to wait until April anyway, because the NGSC client is not available until Q1 anyway. The second reason is because if your organization is currently using the existing sync client there is currently no automated, in-place takeover or migration of content to the Next Generation Sync Client. This will be added in the first quarter of 2016. Therefore, by April, this capability will be available. This is significant to point out, because if you deploy the NGSC before April, the end-user experience for transitioning to the NGSC is “high touch” as follows:

1. End-users must manually turn off syncing (this cannot be automated by the IT Department)

2. End-users must manually rename the old OneDrive sync folder.

3. At this point, the end-user must launch the setup program and select which folders to sync (this is the new “selective sync” feature in the NGSC client). Note: Several IT deployment options are available (here).

4. Finally, the selected folders are synced back down to the client. Here is the rub – that is a big network impact to your Internet circuit if you have more than just a handful of users. That is why the April date is so important, because the feature to “in-place takeover” of the existing local contents of the previous OneDrive folder avoids having to re-download all the content. I cannot emphasize enough how important this decision is to the overall project.

Recommendation 

The OneDrive for Business sync client brings many new features including 4x faster sync, the highly desirable selective sync feature, removing the 20,000 sync limit, supporting files up to 10GB in size, and the desirable promise of “unlimited” storage (Microsoft repeated this commitment following their announcement of pulling this from the consumer versions of OneDrive). Therefore, I am confident that organizations will eventually come to embrace the new sync client. However, the reality of large enterprises today is that they must wait for the in-place takeover feature to avoid a disruptive impact to their internet circuits. Alternatively, they could “stagger” the deployment into small batches, but at that point, that would cause the overall project to likely last beyond April anyway, so it makes more sense to me to wait until the takeover feature is available.

However, I encourage IT Departments to begin evaluating the new sync client right away. Tech-Savvy IT Users can follow these easy instructions to deploy the NGSC to their machines by following this article (here). However, those instructions don’t point out the recommendation to first stop syncing the current OneDrive folder and renaming the old folder, so just don’t forget those steps.

[Update 12/16/2015 – This has been answered! Microsoft will keep the promise of unlimited storage for OneDrive for Business! See this blog post from Microsoft for more details:
https://blogs.office.com/2015/12/16/onedrive-for-business-update-on-storage-plans-and-next-generation-sync-client/]

I’ve been asked that question a lot lately because of some recent headlines. The official answer today is that you get 1 Terabyte of storage. This is from the official service description (here).

However, almost exactly 12 months ago, Microsoft announced “Today, storage limits just became a thing of the past with Office 365.  OneDrive and OneDrive for Business will now offer unlimited storage—at no additional cost—to our Office 365 consumer and business customers.”

Reference: https://blogs.office.com/2014/10/27/onedrive-now-unlimited-storage-office-365-subscribers/

Reference #2: https://blog.onedrive.com/office-365-onedrive-unlimited-storage/

On the official Microsoft Roadmap site the Unlimited storage promise is still listed as “In Development”

“Moving forward, all Office 365 customers will get unlimited OneDrive storage at no additional cost. In the meantime, get started using your 1 TB of storage today by backing up all those work files kicking around on your PC – with the knowledge that even more storage is on its way!”

http://success.office.com/en-us/roadmap

Then recently, Microsoft announced that the consumer versions will be limited to a 1TB limit and will not get the ‘unlimited’ promise.

Reference: https://blog.onedrive.com/onedrive_changes_FAQ/

According to a prominent Microsoft reporter, Microsoft could be releasing a revised roadmap by the end of November 2015.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-onedrive-for-business-will-unlimited-storage-promises-disappear/

Even if Microsoft was to keep OneDrive at the current limit of 1TB, that would still be enough for each business user to store 1 million Office documents or 330,000 photos, based on an average file size of 7Mb per document, and an average photo quality of 9 megapixels.