Last week, Veeam made the Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 v3 beta publicly available, which means you can download and try out all the new features! VBO, as we call it, has seen huge growth over the last 2 years, and will continue to do so as people realize the need to protect their hosted email, as well as the need to adhere to company policies around retention and legal responsibilities.

What’s New?

From the Veeam Forums post, here’s the list of new features for VBO:

Security:

• Modern Authentication support
• Exclusive service accounts for Exchange Online and SharePoint Online
• Internet proxy support

Backup

• 30x faster SharePoint Online and OneDrive incremental backups
• Support for Exchange Online only plans
• Improved search options in Backup Job wizard
• Improved personal sites selection and exclusion in Backup Job wizard
• Support for including and excluding specific OneDrive folders via REST API or PowerShell

Repository

• New retention type (Backup Style)
• Enhanced storage continuity management

Other

• Built-in reporting
• License revocation
• Rename organization

Feature Details:

This is a great list of features that development has worked hard on, and I’m happy the beta has been made available for everyone!

Modern Authentication support:

Due to increasing security concerns, Microsoft announced that they would be required Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) be enabled on any privileged account, which includes any account granted the following roles:

• Global Administrator
• SharePoint Administrator
• Exchange Administrator
• Conditional Access Administrator
• Security Administrator

With VBO v3 Veeam will support Modern Authentication and MFA app passwords for your service account!

Exclusive Service Accounts:

Now administrator will be able to supply different credentials for Exchange Online and SharePoint Online, instead of using a single account with privileges to both services.

New Repository Type:

For the first 2 versions of VBO, Veeam had implemented an “archive” style of retention – which made perfect sense when talking about e-mail retention, especially as it related to company policies that dictate the length of time email are retained for. If retention was set for 1 year, then any email with a modified date older than 1 year would NOT be included into the backup.

The new retention type of “backup” follows the traditional backup retention people know – everything in the mailbox is retained, and that is kept for the length of retention. This style is identical to Veeam Backup and Replication style retention.

Reports:

The last thing I want to touch on is reporting, which makes its debut in version 3. Now customers will be able to create reports to view consumed licenses, protected mailboxes, and storage consumption.

Be sure to check back as I post on connecting VBO v3 to O365 using an MFA enabled account with minimal permissions.