What is 3DES and does the removal mean anything to your organization?

Just in time for the holidays, Microsoft announced a major update to Office 365: “We’re retiring 3DES in Office 365 beginning February 28, 2019."

Microsoft announced on April 18, 2019 an updated timeline for 3DES retirement: “Starting July 10, 2019, Office 365 Skype for Business will begin retiring 3DES”

Direct Routing, the ability to provide third-party PSTN to Microsoft Teams is now in Public Preview (May 2018) Generally Available (June 2018). The official announcement can be found on Tech Community:

SESSION BORDER CONTROLLERS (SBC). Arrange to work with one of our partners who are being certified for Direct Routing. Due to the criticality of Enterprise Voice, Microsoft has been working closely with these partners to ensure compatibility. These vendors are in process and plan to have their SBC certification complete at the time of General Availability. Please review the content for Direct Routing from AudioCodes, Ribbon, and ThinkTel to understand their offers and start a pilot with them. - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams-Blog/Direct-Routing-NOW-in-Public-Preview/ba-p/193915

A little over a month ago this blog went through a forced migration from one web hosting provider to another due to an acquisition. WordPress data migrated successfully and some of the other sites I host came up without issue. https://realtimeuc.com previously had a dedicated IP, which allowed me to force HTTPS and bring my own certificate. During the migration the site was placed under a shared IP that apparently was directing all HTTPS requests to some professional cleaning and restoration company.

In-order to escalate a PSTN call from Microsoft’s Cloud Connector Edition (CCE) to a conference in Microsoft’s Audio Conferencing for Skype for Business Online, a Hybrid Mediation Server must be created for each CCE.

While working on a Microsoft Flow to automate some tweeting for the O365Eh! Podcast, I ran into a known restriction when using @mention in the available Twitter connector.

Mentioning an @user while posting a tweet is not supported. Specifically, the “@” characters will be stripped while posting a tweet. - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/twitter/

I first looked a Microsoft Flow & Azure Logic Apps about a year ago to handle Skype for Business Online’s CloudPBX/Phone System voicemail distribution: Auto forward Azure Voicemail messages. It’s critical to understand that Azure Voicemail unlike Exchange Unified Messaging, deposits messages directly into a user’s mailbox via OAuth and Exchange Web Services (EWS) vs. sending by SMTP. Basically you can kiss Outlook/Exchange mail forwarding rules goodbye.

In June 2016, I blogged about the fact that in the new Admin Center (preview at the time) a simple “DNS Check” from the portal would actually change the enabled domain purpose/capabilities with no way to disable without a support ticket: Office 365 domain purpose changing without modifying domain settings.

Microsoft announced on January 29, 2018, new features for Microsoft Teams which included Personal App space and the Store: https://blogs.office.com/en-us/2018/01/29/new-ways-to-use-apps-and-get-more-done-in-microsoft-teams/.

Excited that this announcement could finally put the end to my reliance on Outlook and allow Teams to be my single communications app, I headed to the Store. A bit shocked at what I found, there was no Personal App entry for Mail.

Communications Credits (the add-on formally known as PSTN Consumption), is a subscription add-on to the Microsoft Phone System and/or Audio Conferencing license, enabling the ability to:

• Acquire Toll-Free numbers to use with Audio Conferencing meetings, Auto Attendants, or Call Queues. *Calls are billed per minute and require a positive Communications Credits balance.
• Dial out from an Audio Conferencing meeting to add someone else from anywhere in the world or your mobile phone with the Skype for Business or Microsoft Teams app installed.
• Dial international phone numbers when you have Domestic Calling Plan subscription or Dial out for Domestic/International on a pay per minute once exhausted the minutes included in Calling Plan subscriptions.

Get-CSUserSessionDomains is a PowerShell script leveraging the Get-CSUserSession cmdlet in Skype for Business Online to extract a list of unique domains used in communication from user session data. The Get-CSUserSession cmdlet exposes session details for Registration/IM/Audio/Conference/Video, unlike the Skype for Business Online Admin Portal corresponding tools.