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Office 365 for IT Pros Monthly Update #105
The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook team is delighted to announce the availability of the March 2024 update for the 2024 edition. This is the 105th monthly update and it marks the first time that Michel de Rooij contributes to the book. We’d appreciate if subscribers download the updated files at their convenience. There’s no point in having monthly updates if people use outdated versions! The FAQ describes how to access the updated files using the link in the original receipt or from your Gumroad.com account.
As usual, the book’s change log has details of the chapter updates. Suffice to say that Microsoft continues to make hundreds of changes to Microsoft 365 workloads every month, so there’s no shortage of things to write about.
Big Changes in February
Perhaps the biggest change in February was the announcement of the demise of Viva Topics. Launched in February 2021, Viva Topics was a cornerstone of Microsoft’s knowledge management strategy. Now it’s consigned to the great software bit bucket and Microsoft is concentrating on developing Copilot for Microsoft 365 instead.
During February, we took the time to test Microsoft 365 backup (preview). The backup part of the product works as advertised but we were surprised to find problems with restoring SharePoint Online sites. As it turns out, the issues are mostly due to compliance concerns. If a site comes within the scope of one or more retention policies, the site must be removed from those policies to release the in-place holds that block restore operations. Microsoft is being ultra-cautious here because they do not want a rollback operation to lose any data that might be required for compliance purposes. Clearly a solution must be found, but in the interim, the issue raises the question of how other backup vendors deal with the compliance aspect of restore operations?
The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook includes a large chapter covering PowerShell, including the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK. We’ve invested a lot of time in figuring out how to use the SDK effectively, something that’s becoming increasingly important as the Azure AD and MSOL modules approach their retirement date of March 31, 2024. We weren’t amused with Microsoft’s antics around V2.13 and V2.14 of the SDK when what can only have been untested code was shipped in the SDK and duly arrived in customer tenants. The untested code affected major cmdlets and broke customer scripts. Releasing untried faulty code should never happen and Microsoft has some work to do to regain customer confidence as they roll out future SDK releases. Fortunately, V2.15 appears stable.
We also weren’t impressed to find that Microsoft still hasn’t fixed a longstanding bug that stops SharePoint site URLs being output for queries run using the Graph usage reports API. The bug has been present since September 2023. It seems like Microsoft should have fixed it by now, but the issue must be one of those difficult computer science problems that afflict Microsoft development groups from time to time.
Not Complaining
It might seem that the Office 365 for IT Pros team complained a lot during February. That’s possibly true, but we think the comments and criticisms we make are justified by what we see in front of us when we try and use a workload, run a script, track down some obscure documentation, or engage in other ways with Microsoft 365 technology.
Making sense of what Microsoft does can be a royal pain at times. The Microsoft 365 ecosystem is now so large that I’m not sure that anyone can keep track of all the moving parts. Well, maybe it’s possible if you spend every waking hour reading the message center notifications and checking if the text is accurate. No one can do that for an extended period, which is why we have a team of people working on the book.
On to Update #106
We’re already working on the April update. I’m not sure if March will bring the same kind of high-profile issues as we saw in February. All we can say is that change will come. And that’s why it’s so good to be able to update a book monthly to stay current.