One of the advantages of Exchange Online is the scale of the environment and the need to not have to manage individual servers, databases, and specific policies. Instead, those can be left as default configuration objects, which are set by Microsoft.
However, there may be times when you need to manage settings to improve the experience for your users. That’s where the Exchange organizational settings come into play.
The organizational settings are a set of dozens of parameters configured through PowerShell that enable you to customize the Exchange Online experience.
These settings, however, are not available by default and require you to enable them. To enable the customization of organization settings, you will need to follow these steps:
- Launch a PowerShell session.
- In the console interface, enter Connect-ExchangeOnline. When prompted, enter your administrative credentials.
- Run the Enable-OrganizationCustomization command.
You can use the Get-OrganizationConfig and Set-OrganizationConfig cmdlets to retrieve and configure parameters, respectively.
Common parameters to configure include the following:
• ActivityBasedAuthenticationTimeoutInterval – This property is used to specify the period of inactivity before Outlook on the Web (OotW) or Outlook Web App is automatically logged out. The default value is 06:00:00 or 6 hours.
• AppsForOfficeEnabled – This parameter controls whether or not centrally managed apps can be activated to integrate with Microsoft 365 Apps.
• AutoExpandingArchive – This parameter is used to enable auto-expanding archives for Exchange Online mailboxes. Auto-expanding archives automatically grow a user’s archive once it gets close to the storage limit. Once enabled, this option cannot be disabled.
• BookingEnabled – Determines whether or not Books is enabled in the organization.
• DefaultGroupAccessType – Configure the default access type for Microsoft 365 Groups. The default value is Private, but you can also choose Public.
• DefaultMinutesToReduceShortEventsBy – When used in conjunction with ShortenEventScopeDefault, you can choose to automatically create shorter meetings (for example, creating 55-minute meetings when an hour-long or shorter meeting is scheduled).
• EnableOutlookEvents – Used to allow Ootw to discover events in email messages and automatically create items on the calendar.
• EwsAllowList – Specify Exchange Web Services (EWS)-based applications that are allowed to use Exchange Online.
• ShortenEventScopeDefault – When used in conjunction with DefaultMinutesToReduceShortEventsBy, you can choose how to automatically shorten meetings (either EndEarly or StartLate). For example, you can configure the organization settings to automatically start meetings 5 minutes later than the scheduled time. If a user schedules a meeting from 2:00 P.M. to 3:00 P.M., the calendar app will update the meeting to run from 2:05 PM to 3:00 PM.
For example, if you wanted to configure the Exchange Online organizational settings to set meetings less than 1 hour long to start 7 minutes late, you would connect to Exchange Online PowerShell and run the following command:
Set-OrganizationConfig -ShortenEventScopeDefault StartLate -DefaultMinutesToReduceShortEventsBy 7
As with other PowerShell commands, the Set-OrganizationConfig command allows you to configure any of the parameters independently without impacting other organizational configuration settings.
FURTHER READING
The full list of organization settings is available at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/exchange/set-organizationconfig.