December 2023 Update for Office 365 for IT Pros eBook is Available

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.