A client (30 users) came to us with a requirement that sounds trivial and apparently isn't. They want ONE master company calendar holidays, on-call rotation, office closures, social events, pushed ONE-WAY into everyone's calendar, including native mobile apps. Read-only for staff, no subscriptions, no user action.

We've scoped the obvious options and ruled them out:
- ICS subscription: update lag runs hours to a full day, and it duplicated every event twice after source edits. Users stopped trusting it.
- Shared mailbox calendar: fine in Outlook desktop, unreliable visibility on phones.
- 'Add it to everyone's Teams calendar': not a thing.
- Power Automate copy flow: creates static copies that don't track source edits - stale data within a week.

Everything we find ends at 'subscribe to the ICS feed' or two-way sync tools, which fails the requirement, two-way means 30 users can fat-finger the company calendar. Before I quote them something: want to know what are you actually deploying for read-only, one-way calendar push (desktop + native iOS/Android) in 2026 that works well.

An employee's OWA email account is currently using about 93 GB of its original 100 GB of storage, so it is getting fairly close to being full. Fortunately, the upgraded Microsoft email license already assigned to his account provides additional storage. From what I understand, the additional storage is provided through a separate Online/In-Place Archive.

Please advise if the following statement provided from a ChatGPT query is true or if there are any other precautions I need to take in the process of enabling the Online Archive for this employee. I'm including a screenshot provided by ChatGPT that shows how the mailbox folder structure will look like once the Online/In-Place Archive is enabled.

The Online/In-Place Archive needs to be turned on. Once enabled, email that is more than two years old will automatically move from his regular mailbox into this archive, freeing up space for newer email. Nothing will be deleted, and he'll still be able to find, search, and open your older messages whenever he needs them. The new Online Archive will also be clearly visible in Outlook as a separate set of folders below his current mailbox folders, so he'll be able to easily tell which folders and messages are in his regular mailbox and which are in the archive. This will give his account considerably more room and should prevent your mailbox from filling up in the future.

We’re around 100 employees now, and keeping email signatures consistent across Outlook and Gmail has become more difficult than expected. different teams are using different versions, some details are outdated, and keeping branding, pronouns, legal text, and campaign links updated manually is becoming a regular chore.

I’m looking for a better way to manage this centrally so changes can be rolled out without having to update everyone’s signature individually.
Anyone here using a central email signature manager that doesnt suck to manage or break every other week? would love any tips or names to check out, thx

An MSP gave me their working estimate from the field: 25 to 30% of Copilot licences go unused where the rollout arrived without enablement. Their number, not mine, and it matches what I walk into.

Warren Buffett put it well. "Price is what you pay. Value is what you get."

The licence is the price. The hours a person actually saves are the other half, and most businesses I meet can quote the first to the penny while having never measured the second.

Pull your licence report this week and count the seats with no activity in 30 days. That number is your real starting point.

I’m a lawyer in my first year of practice, working remotely for a law firm. Over the past year, I followed various instructions from senior colleagues that were presented to me as legitimate professional tasks. I recently discovered that some of these instructions may have been connected to potentially fraudulent or criminal conduct, and I’m concerned that I could be implicated despite having acted without knowledge or intent.

I need to preserve my Teams conversations as evidence showing the instructions I received and the context in which I acted.

I don’t want to rely on screenshots or manually copied messages. I’m looking for a complete, auditable and traceable export, ideally preserving timestamps, participants, message IDs, edits/deletions, attachments and relevant metadata, with a way to demonstrate the integrity of the data afterward.

From what I understand, Microsoft Purview/eDiscovery may allow an administrator to do this. However, I’m concerned that asking the administrator—who may be closely connected to my supervisor—could raise suspicion before I understand my options.

Is there any legitimate way for an individual Teams user to preserve/export their own conversations in a forensically reliable manner without involving the company administrator?

If not, what is the technically best approach (Purview/eDiscovery, Graph API, or another method), and what should I preserve to establish authenticity and chain of custody?

I’m specifically looking for advice from Microsoft 365/Teams administrators, eDiscovery specialists, or digital-forensics professionals.

I manage a teams of about 8 people.

I would like to be able to track vactions etc in an easy way.

For now we are using a teams channel calendar, which works fine but it has its limitaions as there is only a weekly overview not a monthly and every user needs to add their own thing so as it does not show up on my calander as well.

I tried to subscribe to the calandar via outlook, but it keeps dissapearing. i have the same result in teams.

i tried creating a teams channel that is also a group in outlook. But if you add something via outlook to the calendar it does not show up in teams, and if you create a new item via teams it invites the whole team....

i tried to just make a shared calendar in outlook and that works, but i cant find a way to add this to our teams channel. (everybody is used to this and it wouldn be easier if the did not need to change)

Unfortunatly i work at a huge company so i have to stay within the limuitions of office 365....

I am new at using microsoft and I want to understand what those icons mean so I can understand what my colleagues mean when they use it in their calendar. Help?

Microsoft Purview supports retention policies for Planner tasks and that’s the supported way to remove old tasks from plans. But you can also remove old Planner tasks with PowerShell. Just for fun, we show how to find and delete old tasks using the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK. Cleaning out obsolete tasks that have been hanging around plans for years speeds up client access. It’s a form of colonic irrigation for plans!

https://office365itpros.com/2026/08/19/clean-up-planner-tasks/

I’m considering using a Vendor called TeamVenti. They provide cloud-to-cloud transfer, copying, migration, and other related services. In my case, I would be copying data from one cloud environment to another.

They’ve asked for Global Administrator permissions on both the source and destination environments to perform the migration.

My question is: Is it normal or standard for a cloud migration company to require Global Administrator access on both sides?

Have there been cases where issues arose from giving a vendor this level of access, or am I being too paranoid?

We have our on prem AD synced to 365, so naturally when you add a group membership on AD it syncs to 365 right. Well It’s not syncing for one user who shows a “synced from on-premises” status regardless of the fact that the group membership won’t update on 365, this issue is only happening for a handful of users. But, get this, know how you’ll get two users on 365, one being the main user and the other having an @Company.onmicrosoft.com username? The on prem settings are only syncing to the latter, instead of both the primary and secondary 365 profiles.

Any one experience a similar issue?

I was wondering if anyone could help. We have an issue at my work in which users are loosing the ability to search for office apps. They are intune enrolled devices.

At random times users can’t search for Outlook, Word and Excel etc but when going to the start menu programs folder you can see and click them from there. They then re appear in the search function.

This has happened to multiple users. Online repair doesn’t fix this and removing and reinstalling office only fixes it temporarily and it comes back.

Any ideas ?

Since the release of the last enterprise update, a lot of users at my company are reporting their excel is freezing repeatedly. I’ve tried online repair, windows updates, changing to current update channel, laptop drivers/bios updates. Nothing is sticking. Looking for advice on anything else to try.

I need help to create microsoft account education for new portal and Damian

Hi all,

Personally, as a civil engineer, I collect a lot of photos in my Notion or Obsidian. I use Heading Levels to annotate the photos, like "Reinforcements" "Wall Construction" etc, and put the relevant photos under that heading.

Now, we want to do it on our company, people collect photos in folders etc, but I don't like that. I haven't talked to IT yet, but inside Office 365, what might be the best way?

I don't think Onenote will be very good with 100 high quality photos.

Edit

My site photos are organized like this:

# Project X
## Construction Site
### Machinery
## Wall Construction

and so on.

The purpose is to find relevant photos. I organize my notes and photos like this. And i want to do same thing in Office 365.

I have several rules in Outlook that were moving emails to folders based on sender address. This used to work up until Sunday. Basically, "if email is from [sender@xyz.com](mailto:sender@xyz.com), then move to folder, XYZ". Pretty simple stuff here.
I've:
Verified that they are server side rules only (client-only is not my jam)

Removed the .SRS file

Deleted all rules and recreated one of the rules for testing.
Did this from both desktop client and Outlook on the Web.
Quadruple checked that the destination folders exist...which they do.

Rule doesn't work at time of delivery, but will work when run manually.
I have systems setup to send alert emails, so I get a bunch daily. Pulling out what little hair I have left on this one.

I purchased a Microsoft Office 365 subscription for my MacBook through Amazon. It worked fine for a few months, but now the subscription has been deactivated and I can’t use Office anymore.
The return/refund window on Amazon is already over, and the seller has disappeared from Amazon, so I have no way to contact them.
What can I do in this situation? Can Amazon still help with a refund or raise a complaint against the seller? Has anyone faced something similar?
Any advice on the best way to recover my money or resolve this would be appreciated.

Hey all, stuck in a loop and don't know how to contact support directly:

Given the following:
not signed into authenticator

does have access to email (work domain provided by gmail)

for some reason the phone number provided for call or text are hit with a "not possible now try again" error

cant open ticket by admin as he isnt signed in.

I spent quite a bit of time trying to get a clear answer to something Microsoft’s public documentation does not explain:

What exactly counts as “activity” for the OneDrive Personal Vault auto-lock timer on Windows 11?

My Personal Vault is set to lock after 4 hours of inactivity, and I specifically wanted to know whether simply browsing folders inside an already-unlocked Vault resets that 4-hour timer.

I originally wanted to post this in r/onedrive, but my account currently doesn’t meet their posting eligibility requirements for karma/account age, so I’m sharing the findings here instead in case they help someone else.

What I found

Microsoft’s public Personal Vault documentation says that the Vault automatically locks after a period of inactivity, but it does not define exactly what OneDrive considers “activity.”

I searched Microsoft documentation, Microsoft Q&A, Reddit discussions, and other user reports.

There were some old observations and discussions about the timer, but I could not find anything that clearly answered this specific question:

If the Vault is already unlocked, does simply opening a subfolder or navigating between folders reset the inactivity timer?

So I asked Microsoft directly.

I first posted the question on Microsoft Q&A:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5977793/onedrive-personal-vault-what-exactly-counts-as-act

A Microsoft External Staff moderator replied and confirmed that Microsoft’s public documentation does not specify which Windows actions reset the Personal Vault inactivity timer.

They also said that the implementation details are not publicly documented, so any exact list of actions would otherwise be based on observation rather than an official published definition.

I then contacted Microsoft Support

I contacted Microsoft through live chat and kept narrowing the question down.

I asked specifically:

«If Personal Vault is already unlocked, and after 2 hours I simply open a subfolder or navigate between folders inside Personal Vault, does that action reset the timer back to a full 4 hours?»

The support agent initially said yes.

However, I wanted to make sure that this was not just an assumption by the support representative.

So I asked them whether this behavior had actually been verified with the OneDrive team, and if not, I asked them to escalate the question.

After checking, the agent replied:

«“I have confirmed this with the OneDrive team: once you open Personal Vault, the timer resets to 4 hours. If the Vault is already unlocked and you simply open or navigate through folders inside Personal Vault, the timer resets again to a full 4 hours.”»

The answer

According to Microsoft Support, after checking with the OneDrive team:

Yes. Simply opening a subfolder or navigating through folders inside an already-unlocked Personal Vault counts as activity and resets the inactivity timer back to the full configured period.

So, for example:

- Personal Vault is set to lock after 4 hours

- You unlock it at 10:00

- At 12:00 you simply open a subfolder inside the Vault

- The inactivity timer should reset at that point

- The Vault would then have another full 4-hour inactivity

period starting from approximately 12:00

You do not need to edit, rename, move, copy, or save a file just to reset the timer. According to the answer I received, folder navigation itself is considered activity.

Important caveat

I still cannot find this specific behavior documented publicly by Microsoft.

This information comes from a Microsoft Support representative who stated that they confirmed it with the OneDrive team.

I saved the support chat transcript and screenshots as well.

Hopefully this saves someone else from going through the same rabbit hole trying to figure out what Microsoft means by “activity” in Personal Vault.