At the end of 2014, Microsoft released a cool new feature in Office 365 called Clutter.

Clutter learns from your actions to determine the messages you are likely to ignore. As less important messages arrive, they are automatically moved to the Clutter folder. Clutter does this by leveraging Office Graph’s sophisticated machine learning techniques to determine which messages are Clutter. It gets smarter over time, learning from your prior actions with similar messages, and assessing things like the type of content and even how you are addressed in the message. The Clutter experience is personalized to each individual and reflects an email experience that adapts to your actions and preferences without you having to do anything. The information Clutter learns from each user’s actions are only applied to that user’s experience and are not shared with anyone else.

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Microsoft has released the Lync 2013 Cumulative Update 1 (CU1).  The naming conventions within “Lync” can be a little confusing.  This is a CLIENT update for Lync 2013.

To enable these Lync 2013 updates, make sure both the Lyncloc and Msores packages are installed.  The MS release notes say that this requires a restart of Lync 2013 after you install the update, but I believe a reboot of the client system is required.

For more information: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2812461

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In Office 365, the default password policy requires users to change their password every 90 days.  To some users this is a ridiculously short period of time, but to some administrators this is too long.  You can work it out between your users and your security team what the right time period is for password expiry, but here are some ways of changing this in Office 365. Read More →

One of my customers has been weighing the options of using Lync Online vs Lync On-Premise. There are a lot of questions about the feature sets available between the two offerings. The Microsoft Office 365 community has posted this chart for review.

http://community.office365.com/en-us/w/lync/480.aspx

The following matrix compares features across the delivery models for Lync Server 2010 (on-premises), Lync Online, and Office Communications Online (“OC Online”). Read More →

The star of last year’s product roadmap was Office 365. Microsoft this year looks likely to pivot from the public cloud to the private cloud, while also shipping staples like SQL Server and releasing major betas — and possibly final versions — of blockbusters including Windows 8 tablet, client and server, and Office 15.

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