Is your email thirsty?

Is your email thirsty?

Surely one of my more bizarre questions!  Can email accounts experience thirst, and if so, would it be possible to direct some of the recent torrential rainfall in their direction?

The reason I ask: a recent message from Microsoft stated that an email tenant was *dehydrated*.  This sounds like that powder which can be used to create mashed potato (aka Smash for those in the know).  It turns out that this has a very specific meaning in the IT world.  It’s just another example of jargon obfuscating the message so that you are forced to refer to an industry professional.  Every profession has its own precise terminology which makes sense to the technicians but makes the inner workings of your IT opaque for you.

If you receive an email telling you that your domain’s tenant is dehydrated, it is saying that it is in a compressed state which is also known as *tiny tenant mode*.

The reason for this happening: it saves resources in Microsoft 365.

The impact of dehydration: you will find that you can’t change various settings.  You may well encounter an error message saying that you can’t save changes, with no helpful explanation of why.

What’s a tenant?  Microsoft defines this as the set of services assigned to your organisation.  It is usually associated with a domain name.  Another way of looking at it is that a tenant is an instance of Microsoft 365 services plus your data stored in a specific location – either Europe or North America.

When a tenant is created, the default is dehydrated.  It will share the settings common to a large number of organisations and will thus not utilise so many resources.

Why would you want a hydrated tenant?  The key difference is customisation.  For example, Role Based Access Control is only possible if your instance is hydrated.

Can you simply tick a box to switch from dehydrated to hydrated?  Unfortunately not.  This requires some programming input using Powershell so it is not something your average user can undertake.

Modern computers are meant to be intuitive to use but the systems in the background may well not be set up in the best way for your organisation, so you may wish to customise the settings.  Input from an IT *translator* could well come in handy.   

The moral of the story: it’s worth getting an IT expert on board to make sure you are using your systems to their full potential.  They will also be able to translate the random messages you will receive from your vendors – they may be in English but they just don’t make sense!  As Eric Morecambe said when playing Grieg for Andre Previn “I’m playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order”.

And if you receive a message that your tenant is dehydrated, please don’t pour a glass of water over your laptop keyboard!  Keep calm if you receive a message you don’t understand; it will have meaning for the right person.  Give Computer Troubleshooters a call.