Microsoft 365 - Priasoft

Could Office 365 Directory Based Edge Blocking be causing 550 5.4.1 Recipient address rejected: Access denied NDR’s when using Mail-enabled Public Folders?

Outlook and Office Products may fail connecting to Office 365 in October 2020

Something we have seen that may have been missed by many customers and admins is a quietly published article about Microsoft support for the Office Suite in 2020 (a little more than a year from now!).

This article was found by reviewing the Office 365 Message Center articles back in 2017. Unfortunately, the default view provided by this feature only shows the last few months of articles and the one from 2017 no longer appears.

The article that was posted seems harmless at the time and had a simple statement about Office 365 support in 2020. Most people in our experience never saw this article.

The article indicated that in 2020, Office products that would be used to connect to Office 365 would only be supported and usable by the then current version of Office that was installed from your Office 365 tenant. Our reading interprets this to mean that possibly the retail versions of the Office product will not be usable against Office 365, even if it were the most recent version (Office 2019 as of today).

We suggest all customers of Office 365 to continually review the “Message Center” messages that are posted as well as the “Service Health” advisories. Many changes to Office 365 are announced thru the Message Center, but many changes that can have considerable impact on the enterprise are not announced with any loud or attention-grabbing fanfare. In addition, given that Microsoft may announce changes that are many years in advance of the actual change, such announcements will fall out of view in a few months.

Here are some of the specific details regarding the changes that are scheduled for the latter half of 2020:

April 22, 2019

Office 365 vs. Microsoft 365 – Explained

Microsoft 365, Technical

What’s The Difference Between O365 And Microsoft 365?

Simply put, Office 365 is a cloud platform that offers Exchange online, OneDrive, Word, Excel, Outlook, as well as other services and applications via a subscription plan whereas Microsoft 365 offers the same services and applications as Office 365 but also includes Windows 10 Pro and Enterprise, Mobility + Security for a complete Enterprise offering under a single subscription plan.

Microsoft 365 offers customers, which have not made the transition to Office 365, is an out of the box solution with all the features of Office 365 plus Windows 10, including security and device management right from the start. Additionally, Microsoft 365 is the beginning of a future where desktops and devices are primarily joined to your Office 365 Azure Active Directory subscription taking over the traditional on-premises role of Active Directory running on servers in your datacenter. With this new paradigm, you would generally only need to maintain a backup Active Directory Domain Controller on-premises for redundancy in the event of a temporary loss on network connectivity.

If you are already on Office 365 you still have the option to deploy Windows 10 Pro and subscribe to a security service, however, this approach is not as simple as subscribing to Microsoft 365 from the beginning.

If you would like to learn more about Office 365 and Microsoft 365 we have provided some resources to get you started. If you would like to speak to one of our cloud migration specialists you can contact us here.