03Mar2022
28May2021
Education and Governance: your weapons to combat fear and enable modern workplaces
I had lunch with a colleague recently who expressed skepticism over my (admittedly non-conventional) methods for migrating users from a legacy file server to OneDrive, Teams, and SharePoint. "Some things work better in Theory than they do in Practice," he says. Well, that's funny because I built my method from actual...
09Mar2021
There is no panacea, there is no silver bullet
I had a really interesting question come up during one of my recent online courses. One of the participants asked whether device management, and even MAM (application-based management) were necessary anymore, now that we have stuff like MIP and Sensitivity Labels. I was taken aback by this question and I...
18Aug2020
Behold: The Power of Sensitivity Labels
Even though some people are aware of the concepts of Data Classification and tools such as Microsoft 365 Sensitivity Labels, I do not think that many of us out there have yet grasped the full implications, or taken the long view, so to speak. Note: this is a longer read....
04Aug2020
A Brief History of Collaboration and Governance
I have slowly been converting people to the "modern collaboration mindset" during the past couple of years through my op-ed style of writing. I think you can appreciate that changing minds through writing is something which rarely if ever happens in areas like politics, but it turns out this can...
28Jul2020
Is “Best Practices” a myth?
I often find myself musing over this question these days. Granted, I actually do publish something called The Microsoft 365 Best Practices Checklists--but really these are more like recommendations. In fact, I recently updated them to include governance decisions around collaboration (e.g. affecting apps such as OneDrive for Business, Teams...
07Jul2020
Yes, you really can let go: Microsoft 365 Groups and Teams creation policy, revisited
I have to laugh because this is still such a seemingly controversial idea. "Should users be allowed to create their own Teams?" I have written about this topic many times before, but I still get the best comments about it from non-believers. The real issue is that these folks have...
08Apr2020
Updated! Checklist co-developed with Microsoft: Set up your SMB customers for secure remote working
I had the great pleasure to participate in a webinar today with David Bjurman-Birr (Partner Architect) and Jon Orton (Director of Product Marketing for Microsoft 365 SMB). David and I recently developed a checklist together for Microsoft 365 Business Premium, aimed at helping partners who work in the SMB space...
25Nov2019
Unpopular opinion: Do not restrict users from creating Teams (Office 365 Groups)
I realize that advocating for no (or very limited) boundaries on who can create Teams puts me in the minority. When I look out across the community, I mostly see consultants in this space suggesting the opposite is a superior approach for various reasons--that the privilege should be constrained heavily....
14Oct2019