May 2022 Update Available for Office 365 for IT Pros

Tenth Update Issued for the 2022 Edition

The Office 365 for IT Pros team is delighted to announce that the tenth monthly update for the 2022 edition is available for subscribers to download.

Subscribers should use the link in their original receipt or their Gumroad account to download the updated files. We’ve also updated the Kindle edition and made a small update to the companion volume by moving some Exchange Online content from the main book. See our FAQ for more information about downloading book updates.

The changes in the Office 365 for IT Pros May 2022 update covered varied subjects including new Microsoft numbers for Office 365 paid seats (now at 345 million), Azure AD B2B Collaboration cross-tenant settings, Viva Topics support in OWA, new filters for Team meetings, more examples of how to use the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK, 51 new sensitive information types, and a new capability for sensitivity labels to manage SharePoint sites. In between, there were a bunch of other minor updates (including many product name changes due to Microsoft’s rebranding to create the Purview suite), all described in the book’s changelog.

Chasing Typos

This month, we put many of the Office 365 for IT Pros chapters through a Grammarly review. Ever since the book started, we have used the grammar and spell-checking functions in Word to find and suppress typos. We’ve heard a lot about the capabilities of Grammarly and decided to see if it could help improve the quality of our chapters. We used both Grammarly for Windows and the Grammarly add-in for Microsoft Office (Word and Outlook) and the good news is that it works, but with some caveats.

Grammarly found some errors that Word didn’t, or that we had overlooked. For whatever reason, Grammarly helped us improve the quality of several chapters. As a bonus, when checking chapters, we found some old text that we could remove without affecting the book, which is always helpful.

Grammarly Blues

On the downside, Grammarly can take a lot of system resources at times. Predictably, this should happen in the initial period after opening a chapter, but sometimes PC CPU usage went to 100% for a moment, and invariably Task Manager pointed the finger at Grammarly. With some large chapters (or the book file), we turned Grammarly off when it wasn’t needed to avoid the performance penalty.

More importantly, Grammarly couldn’t process some of the Office 365 for IT Pros chapter files. It seems like Grammarly couldn’t check documents if, at any time in the past, someone had assigned them with a sensitivity label with encryption. The error “Grammarly can’t check documents labeled Confidential, Restricted, or Internal” (Figure 1) is a tad misleading because many sensitivity labels have different names. Documents assigned sensitivity labels without protection worked fine.

The error message told us to remove the label. However, this didn’t work, even if we used the PowerShell Set-AipFileLabel (part of the unified labeling client) or Unlock-SPOSensitivityLabelEncryptedFile (from the SharePoint Online module) cmdlets to remove the labels.

So far, we haven’t found a way around the problem using the obvious methods and there’s no helpful advice on the internet, possibly because relatively few people who might use Grammarly also use sensitivity labels. The brute-force approach of creating a new document and pasting the content from a document that Grammarly refuses to process does work and got the job done, but it’s not an ideal solution. Our theory is that Grammarly doesn’t like some metadata inserted in documents by Microsoft Purview Information Protection when a user applies a sensitivity label. It’s about as good an explanation that we can give right now.

Please Download and Use the Update

We would appreciate if our subscribers would download and use the updated files. Part of the joy of ePublishing is that the content of a book can evolve and improve over time. We think that the May 2022 update improves both the quality of the text and the accuracy of the information, so it’s a good one to use.