Monthly Update #108 Released to Subscribers

The team is happy to release the final update for the Office 365 for IT Pros 2024 edition. Monthly update #108 is the eleventh and last update for this edition as we will release the Office 365 for IT Pros 2025 Edition on July 1, if all our plans proceed as we hope.

Subscribers should download the latest files from their Gumroad.com account or use the link in the receipt they received after the original purchase. More information about obtaining updated files is available in our FAQ. We’ve updated the Kindle book files on Amazon.com too. Unfortunately, purchasers of the Kindle book must contain Amazon support to gain access to the updated files.

A Massive Source of Knowledge

The updated book contains a mixture of new information, changes, and deletions as we keep pace with the ongoing flood of changes for Microsoft 365 applications delivered by Microsoft. To give some idea about the effect on the book of tracking change, the July 2023 release spanned 1,352 pages (693,609 words). The current update spans 1,429 pages (733,864 words).

Since we released Office 365 for IT Pros 2024 edition, we’ve added 67 pages (net) with 40,255 words. Behind those raw statistics are a bunch of changes (which might not affect page or word count) and deletions (which create space for new material). A glance at our change log gives an insight into where the changes occurred. If anyone doubts the usefulness of a book that’s constantly updated to cater for ongoing change in a technology, they only need to look at our change log.

The New Version

A new version gives the writing team the chance to review the book end to end. We’re currently in the middle of a comprehensive technical edit process to improve material, identify outdated content that’s lingering and occupying space, address areas that need additional explanation, and even update screenshots to match current user interfaces. Microsoft developers appear to be fascinated by user interface tweaks. They change one or two words on a screen and don’t say anything, so we only find out about the need for a figure update if someone tells us or we notice the change.

The tasks listed above are the norm for us. The 2025 edition is the eleventh in a series going back to 2015. This time around, we plan to make some more fundamental changes.

No More Companion Volume after the 2024 Edition

First, we’re dropping the companion volume. This book was intended to be the place where we could move old content so that people who still needed the information could find it. However, the companion volume has become increasingly decrepit, and we doubt if many still use it. Another factor to consider is the improvement in Microsoft documentation over the years, meaning that those who need information about something like Microsoft Forms or Sway can find it online.

A New PowerShell Book

Second, as obvious from the numbers cited above, the main book is too big. We’ve thought about this a lot and concluded that the best way forward is to split off standalone books covering selected topics. At the end, we might end up with a group of six books under the Office 365 for IT Pros banner. For now, we will start with PowerShell and have created a standalone 200-page book called “Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell.” We plan to sell this book on its own as well as bundling it with Office 365 for IT Pros.

The main book still includes many PowerShell examples where they fit in context. However, the in-depth discussions about PowerShell, the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK, and using Graph API requests from PowerShell have a new home. The PowerShell book includes about 40% more content than the equivalent chapter in the 2024 edition.

It’s too early to say yet what the next standalone book will be. It could cover Groups and Teams, or maybe Compliance. We’re still noodling on that topic.

What is clear is that Office 365 for IT Pros subscribers will receive both the main book and any standalone books we create. You won’t lose access to any information. In fact, you’ll have even more information at your fingertips.

Subscribing to Office 365 for IT Pros 2025 Edition

We still have one more month to run before Office 365 for IT Pros 2025 Edition is available. We understand that people are unwilling to subscribe to a book that will soon be replaced. Our offer is that anyone who subscribes to Office 365 for IT Pros 2024 edition in June 2024 will receive a free upgrade to the 2025 edition when it is available.

As to our current subscribers, we thank you for your support. Without your backing we could not afford to spend the time we do to keep the book updated. After we publish the 2025 edition, you’ll be able to upgrade your subscription for a heavily discounted price. It’s our way of saying thank you.

Monthly Update #107 Available for Download

The Office 365 for IT Pros writing team is proud (once again) to announce the latest monthly update for the Office 365 for IT Pros (2024 edition). This is monthly update #107. Subscribers who purchased through Gumroad.com should use the link in the receipt sent for the original purchase or fetch the updated files from their Gumroad account. The link always downloads the latest files. If you bought through Amazon.com, you’ll have to ask Amazon support for help to get the update. Sorry, but that’s how Kindle publishing works. See our FAQ for more information about how to download updates.

The change history for the update is posted to our change log. Be aware that the change log is a guide to the areas of the book where our authors have been active instead of a detailed list of every change made. Too many changes occur to note every detail.

The Accrual of Digital Debris

As the era of AI unfolds, one thing that’s becoming very apparent is the impact of digital debris that accrues inside Microsoft 365 repositories. Copilot for Microsoft 365 uses Graph requests to find item available to the signed-in user when it generates responses to customer requests. Copilot cannot assess the accuracy of information stored in a document nor cannot correct what it finds. All Copilot works with is words and the words it outputs might be incorrect or misleading based on what found in the data retrieved from SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, and Teams.

People generally aren’t very good at clearing out old items from their mailboxes, OneDrive account, or sites that they access. It’s easier to leave the task until some event happens, like a shared mailbox running out of quota. Retention policies help with basic storage maintenance by removing items based on date. However, retention policies are a blunt instrument that can remove good content along with bad. Users can control retention processing by assigning retention labels that set specific retention periods for the assigned items. I used to be very good at this and assigned retention labels assiduously. Now I find that I depend on default retention labels assigned at the document library label or by a retention policy.

The upshot is that Microsoft 365 tenants accumulate digital debris over time. Apart from an overconsumption of storage (and potential an increase in costs for products like Microsoft 365 backup), the debris didn’t matter. With artificial intelligence reasoning over everything it finds, the debris matters a lot more.

I don’t think a good answer exists for the problem exists at present. Asking users to download the contents of a document library to Excel might expose what’s in the document library better than browsing through the SharePoint GUI, but someone’s still got to assess and decide if items should be deleted or kept. It’s quite a conundrum.

Entra ID Apps

Another topic that’s receiving attention is over-permissioned Entra ID apps. This problem was coming for a while. You could argue that the root cause is the ease in which users can create registered Entra ID apps and the lack of management around those apps once created. Both assertions are true. Attackers have been exploiting the gaps around Entra ID apps for years, notably in the recent Midnight Blizzard attack against Microsoft. Once a malicious app with high level of permissions becomes active in a tenant, it can do terrible damage and exfiltrate large quantities of data without anyone noticing.

Like many things in life, there are some simple things you can do to protect your tenant. For example:

• Don’t allow non-admin users to create registered apps. They don’t need to. And if they do, they can explain the reason why to an administrator. Block this option in the Entra admin center.
• Monitor high-priority permissions assigned to apps and query why the permissions are needed. Events about permission assignment is captured in the audit log. Use a scheduled process to report unexpected assignments.

The steps don’t need sophisticated tooling. The data is there. It only needs to be fetched (with PowerShell) and analyzed by people who understand the tenant. Chapter 23 includes details about the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK. It’s now a fundamental tool for tenant administrators because of its ability to access data from all parts of Microsoft 365.

Upward and Onward for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook

The process to build monthly update #108 has already started. This will be the last update for Office 365 for IT Pros (2024 edition). We plan to move to the 2025 edition on July 1, 2025. Hopefully, you’ll join us along the way.

Office 365 for IT Pros Monthly Update #106: the Only Always Up-to-Date Book About Microsoft 365

The fact that SharePoint celebrated its 23rd anniversary on March 27 is a reminder that successful software stands the test of time. Recent innovations in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem like the Loop App and Copilot for Microsoft 365 have a long way to go to prove their resilience and usefulness over time. Teams seems to have been around forever, but it’s only a 7-year-old youngster that’s a mere stripling compared to the 34-year record for Exchange.

Which brings us to monthly update #106 for Office 365 for IT Pros. The updated files are available for subscribers to download from Gumroad.com. Please use the link in your receipt or your Gumroad.com account to download the latest files. Details about major changes are available in our change log while our FAQ contains more details about how to download the updates. Readers who buy a Kindle version through Amazon.com need to contact Amazon support to be allowed access to the update.

March Topics for the Office 365 for IT Pros Team

Not everything that appears in Office365itpros.com ends up in the book, but what does appear is a good pointer to what we’re interested in. During March, we covered a range of diverse topics, including:

• How to customize quarantine messages.
• Using audit data to figure out which accounts might be good candidates for Copilot licenses.
• Microsoft’s disclosure that the classic version of Outlook for Windows will be supported until at least 2029.
• The advent of restricted SharePoint search, which seems like a bad tactic to us.
• How to use PowerShell to clean out all messages from a Teams channel.
• Why archiving Teams channels is a good idea.
• Users of the Loop app will soon be able to share workspaces and pages with people outside the tenant.
• Understanding how much Microsoft 365 Backup charges to protect data.
• Converting an Entra ID external account to be an internal account.
• The High Completeness option for audit log searches.
• All about Microsoft 365 tenant identifiers, including some new Graph APIs to resolve tenant identifiers.

It’s an eclectic set of topics, but it does prove the breadth of knowledge that Microsoft 365 tenant administrators need to acquire to understand the moving parts within a tenant.

Notable Deprecations

Now that we’re in April 2024, it’s good to note that Microsoft has retired the classic Teams client. It might not disappear from sight for a while, but it will eventually slip away. People should be using the new Teams 2.1 client now.

Second, the AzureAD, AzureADPreview, and MSOL PowerShell modules are deprecated. The license assignment cmdlets in these modules don’t work because Microsoft 365 moved to a new license management system. The rest of the cmdlets will continue to work without support. Microsoft will eventually retire these modules and that will be that. It’s time to embrace the power of the Microsoft Graph and transfer code to use the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK.

Office 365 for IT Pros Update #107

We’ve already started work on monthly update #107 and plan to make it available on May 1, 2024. In late April/early May the major Microsoft 365 conference will be held in Orlando, Florida. Given the amount of attention and sponsorship Microsoft pours into this event, it’s easy to anticipate that Microsoft will make some major announcements or provide some in-depth technical information that might affect tenant planning.

We’ll be at the conference to catch up with many industry contacts from inside and outside Microsoft. If you want to attend the conference, here’s a link that will get you a $100 discount. Come by and attend Tony’s sessions. The first is “Mastering the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK” (Tuesday, 30 April at 11:30am). If you’re still struggling with migrating from the old Azure AD PowerShell modules, the SDK session is one to attend. The second is “Don’t let Copilot for Microsoft 365 be a Vanity Project” (Wednesday, 1 May at 9:45am). Should be fun!

Monthly Update #104 Available for Download

The Office 365 for IT Pros team is delighted to announce the availability of the February 2024 update (monthly update #104) for the Office 365 for IT Pros (2024 edition) eBook. We urge subscribers to download the updated files from your Gumroad.com account or by using the link to the files included in the receipt emailed to you upon purchase.

Details of the changes in update #104 are available in our change log. Please consult our FAQ for more information about how to download the updated files.

Busy January

A new year brings new developments and new challenges. Possibly the biggest update in January 2024 occurred when Microsoft removed the limitations on Copilot for Microsoft 365 purchases to allow tenants with Office 365 E3 and E5 licenses to consider Copilot deployments at a much lower cost. The Copilot Pro license also arrived to serve personal consumers.

It’s likely that the pace of Copilot trials will now accelerate as people try out the AI assistant to see if it makes sense in their environment. Our experience so far is that Copilot is great at some things (like summarizing Teams meetings) and less impressive in other areas (like text generation). A solid test using your own information will tell you if it makes sense to proceed with a mass roll-out of expensive licenses. We’ll support this activity by gradually increasing the amount of Copilot-related content in the book, especially information about managing Copilot.

Another big story during January was Microsoft’s admission that the Midnight Blizzard nation state attackers managed to penetrate their production Microsoft 365 tenant and exfiltrate email from some corporate email accounts, including members of its senior leadership. The route in was a password spray to compromise an account in a test tenant followed by use of a malicious OAuth app.

The episode proved once again that enabling MFA for all accounts should be the norm (and here’s a script to help you report MFA enablement and use). The app permissions report script we published afterward might help your tenant avoid a similar attack.

More positively, Microsoft announced that Office 365 now has more than 400 million paid seats when they revealed their FY24 Q2 results. Even after 13 years, Office 365 user numbers keep on growing at around 2.5 million seats monthly.

New and Deprecated Functionality

New functionality continues to flow and it’s important that tenants keep a close eye on the announcements Microsoft makes in the Microsoft 365 admin center message center. A flood of updates appeared during January, including the ability to share contact information during Teams chats. I think this feature will be popular. Unsurprisingly given the retirement of the classic Teams client at the end of March 2024, it’s noticeable that new Teams features tend to be available only for the new client.

Other old functionality that’s due for retirement soon include the Azure AD and Microsoft Online Services (MSOL) PowerShell modules. Apart from the cmdlets that deal with license management (already obsolete and non-functional), the other cmdlets in these modules will continue working after March 31, 2024, but Microsoft won’t provide support if customers experience problems using the cmdlets. If you haven’t done so already, it’s time to embrace the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK and convert scripts to use SDK cmdlets. Chapter 23 of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook is packed with examples of how to use the SDK cmdlets and we add more each month.

Microsoft’s latest attempt to retire the Search-Mailbox cmdlet seems to be more serious than before. I never mind seeing old technology retiring if it is replaced by better technology, but that’s not what’s happening here. The purported replacement (compliance search purge actions) might have some advantages in larger tenants as the number of mailboxes to remove items from scale up, but gaps still exist between what you can do with Search-Mailbox and what’s possible with compliance search actions.

Update #105 Starting Up

No sooner than we finish one update than we start on the next. February 2024 is a 29-day month, so we’ve an extra day of updates to process. What fun! Stay tuned for update #105 coming on March 1, 2024.

Monthly Update #103 Now Available for Download

The Office 365 for IT Pros team is delighted to welcome the new year with the 103^rd monthly update for the Office 365 for IT Pros (2024 edition eBook. The updated files are now available for subscribers to download from Gumroad.com (the EPUB/PDF version) or Amazon. The book’s change log contains outline details of the major updates applied during December. More information about fetching updates is available in the FAQ.

December Articles on Office 365 for IT Pros Blog

Despite the shortness of the working month, December 2023 saw the team investigate different topics in Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Entra ID, Microsoft Purview, and Microsoft 365 Copilot. Amongst the articles published were the following selection:

• Exclude Breakglass Accounts from Conditional Access Policies with PowerShell
• How the Auto-label Retention Label Policy for Cloudy Attachments Works
• Entra ID Captures Timestamp for Last Successful Sign In for User Accounts
• Blocking the Welcome Message for Microsoft 365 Groups
• Reporting Entra ID Admin Consent Requests (for OAuth Apps)
• Creating a Hold Report for Microsoft Purview eDiscovery Cases
• Using Microsoft 365 Copilot for Word
• Exchange Online Retention Policies and the Deleted Items Folder

Just because we publish an article about a topic doesn’t mean that the information turns up in the book. Something that we discover when researching a theme might only warrant a brief mention in a paragraph. Others end up as complete sections that we develop over time.

In other words, there’s no direct correlation between an article showing up on Office365itpros.com and the eBook content. The aim here is to share information about interesting aspects of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem as we discover facts and insights. If we included everything in the book, we’d end up with a 2,500-page monster. 1,350 pages is quite enough.

Office 365 for IT Pros: 2023 in Review

My full review of the Microsoft 365 year for 2023 is available on Practical365.com. In a nutshell, Microsoft’s marketing energies focus on Copilot for Microsoft 365 while their sales efforts look to increase the amount of licensing revenues they can extract from customers. There’s nothing wrong with a commercial company seeking to make money from an installed base; it’s just a pity that everything becomes quite so intense around one area, especially when the cost of acquiring and using Copilot for Microsoft 365 is probably higher than most tenants can afford. Hopefully the price will decline (or inflation will catch up) to bring AI-based assistance within the reach of all those who want it.

Many good things happened across Microsoft 365 during 2023 including better security for email (but too much spam still gets through, including obvious phishing attempts), the availability of the Teams 2.1 client (the sole client from March 31, 2024), and many Entra ID enhancements in an ongoing effort to secure connections. The number of apps in the Teams app store is 2,282 and growing, even if some of the apps need to be updated for the new client. There’s no doubt that Teams is a very popular app platform.

SharePoint Online is on a roll with initiatives like SharePoint Premium and SharePoint Embedded due to be revealed more broadly in 2024. During the year we’ll also be able to assess the true impact of the Microsoft 365 Backup offering, promised for delivery by the end of 2023 but still not in my tenant as I write this on December 31. I guess a few hours remain for the product to show up.

Time Passes By

Although we will see new products in 2024, one thing that won’t change is the need to keep on top of change. Our purpose and intent is to help our subscribers master change within Microsoft 365. On to monthly update #104!

Monthly Update #102 for Office 365 for IT Pros

After a packed month digesting the slew of Microsoft announcements made at the recent Ignite 2023 conference plus attending the European SharePoint Conference in Amsterdam (ESPC 23), we’re happy to report that files for monthly update #102 for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook are available for downloads. Subscribers for the PDF/EPUB version can access the updated files using the link in the receipt they received via email when they paid for their subscription or through their Gumroad.com account. See our FAQ for more information about how to retrieve updated book files.

Copilot Everywhere, Except in Office 365 for IT Pros

Coming out of Ignite, my feeling was that Microsoft executives who lead development teams are under the cosh to make sure that their products have some form of Copilot AI-powered digital assistant in their line-up. Maybe 170 different versions of Copilot appeared in some form or another in Ignite demos of announcements. I suspect that some consolidation will happen in the future.

The same trend continued in the Microsoft presentations at ESPC 23 this week. It’s all propaganda of course, designed to make customers feel inadequate if they don’t want to invest in Copilot.

Yet Copilot for Microsoft 365 is a product that is inaccessible to the vast majority of the 400 million paid Office 365 seats. Many tenants don’t have the right base ‘eligible’ licenses (Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 for enterprises, Microsoft 365 Business Standard or Premium for SME) and don’t want to upgrade, or they might not want to spend the $108K demanded for a minimum of 300 Copilot seats at $30 each per month for a year. Or they might not have figured out a business case to justify the investment. After all, it’s a lot of money to create nicer PowerPoint presentations or help users master pivot tables in Excel. Even the undoubted value gained from summarizing Teams meetings or email threads is only an advantage if the time saved is used for productive purposes.

Studies released by Microsoft naturally outline the case for acquisition and report that 77% of users surveyed wouldn’t want to give back Copilot. I’m sure that’s true, but I am equally sure that surveying a small and carefully selected target audience can produce suitable results to prove a point.

Our attitude to Copilot for Microsoft 365 is simple when it comes to book content. We note the existence of the technology and will document important issues that tenant administrators need to be aware of in dealing with Copilot, such as the generation of audit and compliance records. But don’t expect us to pour energy into describing user-level functionality enabled through Copilot or a Graph connector. As noted above, the current iteration of Copilot for Microsoft 365 is a niche product. When and if it becomes more accessible, we will reconsider expansion of our coverage. We think this is a practical and pragmatic approach.

Office 365 for IT Pros Change Log

As usual, the change log describes the major changes applied to book chapters. Other undocumented changes exist where we’ve taken the opportunity to fix small problems (like a spelling mistake), rewrite some text to make it clearer, or improve a PowerShell example. Writing this book is very much like writing software: a process of continual and ongoing improvement to make sure that what is delivered is as good as we can make it.

On to Update #103

With the holiday season starting up, Microsoft engineering activity usually spins down. We don’t expect to see many announcements during December, but we do expect to have access to features announced in October and November that Microsoft will try to deliver before the holiday freeze. We’ll work through developments as they appear and be all set to deliver update #103 at the start of the new year.

Download new Office 365 for IT Pros Files Now

The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook team is delighted to announce that the 101^st monthly update is now available for download. Subscribers to the PDF/EPUB version can download the updated files from Gumroad.com using their account or the link contained in the receipt emailed to them when they subscribed. People who bought the Kindle edition from Amazon can ask Amazon support to make the update available to them.

Office 365 for IT Pros Monthly Update 101

As in any month, the latest update covers a variety of topics. For example:

• New data about user numbers released in Microsoft’s FY24 Q1 results (Teams now has 320 million monthly active users).
• Deprecation of the Set-UserPhoto and Get-UserPhoto cmdlets.
• A new organization setting to allow tenants avoid roaming signatures until Microsoft fixes the problem with OWA signatures.
• The storage consumed by Loop workspaces (but not Loop components used in apps) will count against tenant SharePoint storage quotas.

During the month, we also published details of how to use the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK (and PnP.PowerShell) create and update Microsoft Lists. This led to the addition of a small paragraph in chapter 23 and is an example of the kind of research the writing team does to improve the quality and coverage of the book.

We also expressed our annoyance at the number and persistence of the annoying pop-up messages Teams insists on displaying to users.

For more information about changes in the 101^st update, please see our change log. Details of how to download updates can be found in our FAQ.

New Teams Client Becomes the Only Teams Client in March 2024

The biggest change for many Microsoft 365 tenants is the launch of the new Teams client, which attained general availability on October 5, 2023. There’s no doubt that the new Teams client is an advance over the “classic” client in terms of performance, resource consumption, and some functionality (like guest access to multiple tenants). Microsoft still has some work to do to attain full feature equivalence across the two clients, but this will come in time. A useful web page explains where Microsoft hopes to make progress and where functionality differs across the two versions.

Nice as it is to have the new client, I think people were surprised when Microsoft issued message center notification MC686187 on October 31 to tell customers that Microsoft plans to remove the classic client on March 31, 2024. People using the classic client at that time will receive an automatic upgrade to the new client, even if they’d really prefer to stay with the old version.

The new Teams client isn’t available yet for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), so VDI users are unaffected by the deprecation and will not be automatically updated. The same is true for Teams Room and Surface Hub devices, which need a special version of the new client to deal with their environments.

I fully understand Microsoft’s desire to remove the classic client. They’ve invested a ton of engineering effort to move away from the Electron-based roots of the old client to develop a new client that answers many of the criticisms expressed over the years. They don’t want to be forced to keep two very different client code bases functionally equivalent as new features roll out, (like using Microsoft Designer to generate custom images for announcement channel posts).

Maintaining two client code bases is an expensive proposition, as Microsoft knows well from their experience with Outlook. Reducing engineering and support costs is one of the prime motivating factors in the effort to deliver the Monarch “One Outlook” client. Microsoft is already pushing customers away from the old Win32-based Outlook for Windows desktop client with tactics like insisting that only Monarch will support Microsoft 365 Copilot.

No Votes for Customers

Forced client transition to gain new functionality is part of living with a cloud service. It happens. Customers don’t get to vote (unless you want to return to an on-premises deployment). Oh well, upward and onward toward the 102^nd monthly update for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook, due on December 1.

Huge Change in the Size and Coverage of Office 365 for IT Pros Since May 2015

The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook team is thrilled to announce the availability of the October update for Office 365 for IT Pros (2024 edition). This is the one hundredth update we’ve issued since the original publication of the book at the Microsoft Ignite conference in Chicago in May 2015. Like any of our monthly updates, Update #100 is packed full of valuable updates.

Things were all so simple in 2015. Most migrations were for Exchange 2007 and 2010 servers to Exchange Online. The transition to SharePoint Online hadn’t really begun because of a lack of tools. Skype for Business Online had replaced Lync Online. The original OneDrive client was proving just how bad synchronization could be. None of what’s now available in Microsoft Purview had appeared. Yammer was making waves, mostly because Microsoft marketing thought it was the next big thing (which it never became), and Teams didn’t come along until it appeared in preview in November 2016.

In November 2015, Office 365 had some 60 million users and the annual run rate for Microsoft cloud revenues was approximately $8 billion. The most recent figures put Office 365 paid seats at around 400 million and cloud revenues of 121.2 billion.

All of which meant that the majority of our first book covered Exchange Online and we could fit everything into just over 500 pages, which meant that we produced some printed copies with Microsoft’s help.

Roll on to update #100 and Office 365 is very different. Our page count is 1,338 pages with some 710,000 words. One chapter alone (23: Managing Microsoft 365 with PowerShell and the Graph) is 132 pages and we have over 1,300 PowerShell examples across the book. All of this is due to covering the change occurring across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem since 2015.

The October 2023 Update

Subscribers to the PDF/EPUB version can download the updated files from Gumroad.com. Amazon Kindle readers can ask Amazon support to make the update available to them. Our FAQ includes information about how to fetch updates. Details of what’s changed are documented in the change log.

The Next Phase for Office 365 for IT Pros

It’s becoming more and more obvious that Microsoft wants to move customers off the Office 365 products to the more expensive Microsoft 365 SKUs. New functionality like Microsoft 365 Copilot and the Loop app are licensed through Microsoft 365 SKUs and not available to Office 365. Making new functionality unavailable to Office 365 E3 and E5 license holders are deliberate product management decisions made by Microsoft. There is nothing in Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 that makes them more suitable to host Copilot or Loop.

Microsoft is perfectly at liberty to make whatever product management decisions they feel best serves their interests. And in some cases, upgrading from Office 365 to Microsoft 365 is absolutely the right thing for a customer to do.

Since the inception of the book, we have used Office 365 E3 as our baseline for coverage because it seems like this is the most common license in enterprise tenants. If a feature can be used with Office 365 E3, we’re very interested in it. If something requires higher-end or add-on licenses, we’re less likely to cover that feature. Going forward, it might be the case that Microsoft 365 E3 becomes the new baseline, especially if this is what’s needed to take advantage of the features and functionality flowing from Microsoft’s investments in artificial intelligence.

On to the Second Hundred

We had no conception about how quickly the technology landscape around Office 365 would change when we started writing in summer 2014. I wonder what innovations, new solutions, and product breakthroughs the next hundred updates will cover. That’s an interesting point to ponder.

Office 365 for IT Pros September 2023 Update Available for Subscribers to Download

The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook team is delighted to announce that the 99^th monthly update is available for subscribers to download in the September 2023 update for the Office 365 for IT Pros (2024 edition) eBook. Subscribers for the EPUB/PDF version can download the updated files from their Gumroad.com account or use the link in the receipt emailed to their address after buying the book. The link always fetches the latest files.

Those who bought the Kindle version of the book from Amazon must contact Amazon support to ask for the updated files to be made available to their account. If you need help to download book updates, please consult our FAQ.

The Nature of Monthly Updates

Details of changes made in monthly update #99 are available in our change log. August is traditionally a slow month in terms of changes flowing from Microsoft development and this August was no different. The relative lack of updates doesn’t stop us from working on the book because there’s always new information that comes to light through experience gained from working with a technology.

The result can be the addition or removal of a few words, or it can end up in the rewriting of a paragraph or complete section. Or we might find a better way to solve a problem with PowerShell and update a script example in the text or publish an updated script in the Office365itpros GitHub repository. Sometimes chapter authors don’t record these changes as worthy of a mention in the change log (or they forget). And then there’s coping with Microsoft branding changes (we think the Entra ID change is behind us). The result is that many changes appear in the book without necessarily showing up in the change log. We regret our lack of professionalism here!

More importantly, the real point is that the book is an ever-changing entity that reflects the 400+ changes an average Microsoft 365 tenant copes with annually. Blogs and online articles struggle to cope with this volume of change. Even in the last month, we’ve seen new articles published by Microsoft that include PowerShell examples based on the old Microsoft Online Services (MSOL) module instead of the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK (our standard for examples in the book). Microsoft will deprecate the MSOL module in April 2024, so why writers choose to use it for new articles is baffling. There’s probably a simple explanation, like someone having some example code that works and avoids a rewrite using the SDK cmdlets, but it’s not great to see this still happening.

Our recommendation is that you should update scripts to replace any code based on the AzureAD and MSOL modules as soon as possible. Office 365 for IT Pros (2024 edition) includes over 1,200 PowerShell examples at this point and hopefully, the many examples of using the Microsoft Graph in chapter 23 help. Because of the appearance of the version 2 of the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK and the need to upgrade code to remove the old modules, this is an areas where we make changes monthly.

Make Sure that The Right Email Address is Assigned to Your Books

One potential issue we noticed this month is that many of our renewing subscribers changed the email address associated with their book subscription. Apart from exposing yourself to the potential of receiving multiple email communications about new updates and versions, it is absolutely fine to use different email addresses for different books. However, if you want to have all your Gumroad.com books registered to the same email address, please contact the Gumroad support team at support@gumroad.com and ask them to assign all your books to your preferred email address.

On to Update 100

We’re now working on monthly update #100, due to appear on October 1, 2023. When we started this project in 2014, I don’t think we contemplated making more than a couple of updates every year. Our confidence in that assumption was sadly misplaced – and for the better.

Tenth Edition Published on July 1 and Available in EPUB/PUB and Kindle Versions

On July 1, the Office 365 for IT Pros team were delighted to publish the tenth edition of our unique eBook, Office 365 for IT Pros (2024 Edition). The book is now available from Gumroad.com (EPUB/PDF version) and Amazon.com (Kindle version). We will keep the 2023 edition online for a month or so to allow subscribers to download the latest files for that edition.

We started on the journey to write an always-up-to-date book about Office 365 in the summer of 2014. It’s been quite a trip since as the technology evolved from a loose collection of products that still had roots in the on-premises servers to a massive cloud service supporting 382 million monthly active users. Teams didn’t arrive until 2016 and now it has 300 million monthly active users. Microsoft cloud revenues extend to an annualized run rate of over $114 billion. Office 365 accounts for about half of those revenues. I don’t think that anyone could have predicted such growth when we started writing about Office 365 in mid-2014.

At this point, we like to think of the eBook as seven separate books, each of which could stand on its own merits:

• Azure AD.
• Exchange Online.
• SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business.
• Teams.
• Microsoft Purview Compliance solutions.
• Microsoft Information Protection.
• Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell and the Graph.

Maybe we should publish each as a separate title. That thought has certainly crossed our minds, but part of the value delivered by Office 365 for IT Pros is the integration of topics and knowledge across the entire ecosystem.

A New Challenge

The next big thing in Office 365 will be the Copilot era of artificial intelligence assistants. In their guidance to customers about how to prepare for Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft emphasizes that users will get best results when Microsoft 365 holds an “abundance of data” for Copilot to process when it builds responses to user queries. That’s data stored in Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Teams. We expect to cover Copilot for Microsoft 365 in detail after Microsoft releases the software later this year.

Creating the 2024 Edition

We update the contents of Office 365 for IT Pros on an ongoing basis and process hundreds of chapter updates annually. When the time comes to build a new edition, we do a complete end-to-end review of all chapters, led by an exhausting and detailed check by Vasil Michev, our technical editor. All hyperlinks are checked to make sure that it works, every screen shot is reviewed to ensure that it is still accurate, and all the PowerShell and Graph examples are tested (including the example scripts in the Office 365 for IT Pros GitHub repository). At the same time, chapter authors and Vasil consider whether text should remain in the book or be removed to make space for new material.

Given that we deal with 23 content chapters spanning 1,318 pages, over 681,000 words, and 1,226 code examples (PowerShell and Microsoft Graph), the review takes enormous effort, but it’s the only way to ensure an acceptable level of quality. The review also gives us a baseline to build on over the eleven monthly updates that we will produce for the 2024 edition between now and June 2024. Given that we have processed 97 monthly updates so far, we think we understand how to build and maintain an eBook on an ongoing basis.

We don’t have a foreword for this edition. This isn’t because we don’t respect the forewords written for previous editions by luminaries such as Jeffrey Snover and Jared Spataro (these forewords are available online). We greatly appreciate the sentiments expressed in these forewords but concluded that forewords are not something that a constantly updated book should have.

Extending Your Subscription

Subscribers for the 2023 edition should have received an invitation to extend their subscription to cover the new book for a low cost. Regretfully, we cannot offer people who bought the Amazon Kindle version a discount because we have no knowledge about these purchasers. Of course, we welcome new subscribers and greatly appreciate their support for our project.

Please consult our FAQ for more information about the book.

Our Sponsor

Quest Software sponsored the 2022 and 2023 editions of Office 365 for IT Pros. For this edition, we’re happy to receive the support of CodeTwo, most famous for their industry-leading email signature management software. Please read Chapter 24 or visit CodeTwo’s website to learn more about their innovative and useful solutions.

Hard Work Starts Now

After a short break, we’ll get going on monthly update #98, due to appear on August 1, 2023. Traditionally, a slower pace of Microsoft software changes applies during the summer months, but I’m sure we will find plenty of things to keep us busy. On to monthly update #98!