Monthly Update #110 Available for Download

The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook team is delighted to announce that the first monthly update (#110) is available for the Office 365 for IT Pros (2025 edition) eBook. Subscribers can download the files for the update using their Gumroad account or the link in the receipt they received via email. For more information about how to download updates, please see our FAQ. The update covers both the Office 365 for IT Pros and Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell books.

Change Log

Many of the changes made in update #110 are minor in nature because they’re grammatical or formatting updates found after the initial publication of Office 365 for IT Pros (2025 edition) in July. Alongside the fixes, we have included a bunch of information about new functionality and changes Microsoft is making within the ecosystem, like the retirement of Office Connectors in Teams. See our change log for more information.

Reviews

It’s great to see so many nice reviews for Office 365 for IT Pros (2025 Edition). If you’d like to add a review for the book, please do so by following the Gumroad guidelines.

Kindle Versions and Paperbacks

We decided not to publish Office 365 for IT Pros (2025 edition) as a Kindle eBook. However, we do publish Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell in both Kindle and paperback formats. Publishing a paperwork edition means that every hyperlink in the eBook version must be converted into a footnote. When writing an eBook, you don’t think about the number of hyperlinks because you know that readers can access the hyperlinks in both the PDF and EPUB formats. As it turns out, the 250-page PowerShell book includes 199 hyperlinks.

The reaction to the paperback version of Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell has been very interesting. People seem to really like it, so we’ll persist with the venture. Of course, you can’t update printed content, so people who buy copies of the paperback get whatever content is available at that time. We will update the printed content whenever we update the Kindle eBook, so multiple versions of the text will be in use.

Creating a print version of the main book is still beyond our means. The main challenge is that the book spans too many pages for online book publishers to handle. I guess we could split the book in half and publish two separate printed books, but that seems like a whole heap of work for an uncertain reward. Right now, I prefer to dedicate whatever time is available to making sure that the content of Office 365 for IT Pros is as up-to-date and accurate as possible.

Upgrading Office 365 for IT Pros Subscriptions

Every year, we offer subscribers the chance to extend their subscriptions to cover the new edition of Office 365 for IT Pros. The discounted price to extend subscriptions escalated over time as follows:

• Update before July 21 for $16.95.
• Update before August 5 for $19.95.
• Update after August 5 for $29.95.

The intention of the escalating cost to renew subscriptions is to reward people who have supported us over the years by renewing immediately each time a new edition appears.

People extend their subscriptions by using a special URL that we provide to subscribers. This year, I’ve noticed a bunch of people who used the special URL to take out a subscription who never subscribed before. When I asked how they obtained the code, I was told that they received the URL from a coworker or friend who thought that they’d like to benefit from the reduced price.

Although I appreciate the friendly gesture, this isn’t how the scheme is supposed to work. If you receive a special URL from us, it’s for your use only. Sharing the URL with others deprives us of revenue and undermines our ability to make discounted subscriptions available.

We haven’t yet decided what to do about those who used a discount code they weren’t entitled to. We could cancel the subscription and remove their access to book files. However, that’s a pretty hard-line attitude to take when people might have been unaware that they were abusing a subscription. So for now we’ll simply ask our loyal subscribers not to share URLs for discounts with others.

If you subscribed to Office 365 for IT Pros (2024 edition), please use the code we sent via email to extend your subscription by August 5. $19.95 isn’t a lot for the Office 365 for IT Pros and Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell eBooks, is it?

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!

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 105^th 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.

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.

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.

Office 365 for IT Pros Monthly Update #98 Available to Subscribers

The Office 365 for IT Pros team shipped monthly update #98 on August 1, 2023. Updated PDF and EPUB files are available to subscribers from Gumroad.com while purchasers of the Kindle version can contact Amazon.com to ask for the updated Kindle file. For more information about accessing updated files for the book, see our FAQ.

Big July News

Change continued during July 2023. The biggest news for some was the announcement about costs for Microsoft 365 Copilot. At $30/user/month for a Copilot license, plus the cost of upgrading to a suitable base eligible license like Microsoft 365 E3, the cost of deploying this artificial intelligence assistant is high enough to cause organizations to pause before committing to a deployment. Proponents argue that it’s not difficult for Copilot to deliver $1 of value daily per user. We’ll have to wait to test that assertion and see what happens when Copilot reaches the harsh reality of public preview later this year. In the meantime, you might want to consider who in the organization is likely to be able to gain value from Copilot.

On a more prosaic note, Microsoft announced plans to rebrand Azure AD as Entra ID. This process will unfold slowly over the next few months with completion due at the end of 2023. The July version of our book includes over 1,200 mentions of Azure AD, so we were ecstatic at the prospect of tracking down each reference to update. Nevertheless, we’ve started and much of the book now uses the new name. We might be a bit ahead of the curve, but one thing we’ve learned about Microsoft rebranding exercises is that Microsoft doesn’t revert its decisions.

More importantly, Microsoft released V2 of the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK (with two subsequent updates to V2.2). Any PowerShell script that interacts with Entra ID to manage user accounts and groups should now use the SDK cmdlets instead of the old Azure AD and MSOL cmdlets. Chapter 23 keeps on expanding as we learn more about the SDK. This update refreshes the SDK examples for V2. Microsoft also updated the Teams PowerShell module, as happens monthly. It is important to keep modules up to date. Our handy script helps you to upgrade a workstation with all the PowerShell modules used to interact with Office 365 at one go. A similar script updates the PowerShell modules for Azure Automation accounts.

We also learned about the Microsoft 365 Backup (for Exchange Online and SharePoint Online) and Microsoft 365 Archive (only for SharePoint) products Microsoft hopes to launch at the end of 2023. Microsoft’s control over APIs and data gives it many advantages, but will tenants want to keep all their digital eggs in Microsoft’s basket? And what will ISVs do to enhance their products using Microsoft APIs? We’ll understand the situation better when products emerge into public preview.

Other Developments in July 2023

Other news included:

• Microsoft Cloud hits $111.6 billion annual revenue (at 72% profitability).
• Teams now supports 1,000 channels per team (if you feel like splitting discussions over so many channels).
• You can get red lips to enhance your participation in online meetings with the Maybelline app for Teams.
• SharePoint Online now includes full support for sensitivity labels for PDFs.
• Monarch is the only Outlook client usable with Microsoft 365 Copilot, so you better learn how to control Monarch.

As we keep on saying, change continues all the time across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. It’s what keeps us busy to update book chapters to make sure that the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook is the most up-to-date material available to tenant administrators.

See our change log for details about chapter updates made in update #98.

On to Update #99

The September 2023 update is the 99^th in the series. We never quite thought that we’d get this far, but I guess there’s some fun in tracking change. At least, I think there is. Enjoy update #98!

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!

Please Download and Use the 96^th Monthly Office 365 for IT Pros Update Now

We’ve just updated the EPUB and PDF files for the 96^th monthly update of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. Subscribers who bought their copy through Gumroad.com can download the updated files from their Gumroad account or by using the link in the receipt they received after buying the book. Amazon Kindle subscribers will have to ask Amazon support to make the updated files available to you. See our FAQ for more information.

This is the last update we will issue for the 2023 edition of Office 365 for IT Pros. Our annual cycle restarts on July 1 when we plan to publish the 2024 edition (our 10^th edition since the original appeared in 2015).

When we release the 2024 edition, we will make it available to current subscribers for a much reduced price. Our costs have risen during the last year (notably by Gumroad raising the percentage they take to 10%, plus increases in credit card and PayPal processing fees), but I believe that we’ll be close to the $14.95 we charged subscribers to renew for the 2023 edition last July. We believe that this isn’t a lot to charge for what’s essentially seven books in one:

• Azure AD.
• Exchange Online.
• SharePoint Online.
• Teams.
• Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle management.
• Information Protection
• Using PowerShell and the Microsoft Graph for Automation.

Plus Teams devices, Intune, DLP, clients, Planner, auditing, an overview of Office 365, and many other details. There’s lots to learn from in Office 365 for IT Pros.

Fit and Finish Updates

Update #96 is a fit-and-finish release. Over the past year, we have made hundreds of changes across the 23 content chapters. At the same time, Microsoft has changed many details, including web site links. During the end-to-end technical review of the 2023 edition in preparation for the 2024 edition, we found a few errors in PowerShell examples, 404 errors because hyperlinks are now incorrect, and changes in UI caused by Microsoft refreshes, rebranding, or new clients. Correcting these kind of problems to make sure that the 2023 edition is in good shape when we finish with it has been the focus for our work on update #96. Some new content is included in different chapters, but not as much as we would add in other months. For more information, see our change log.

We did not update the companion volume. In fact, we’re considering dropping the companion volume (and making it free to people who want to download it) because much of the material in that book is now quite old and is not our focus for future work.

On to Update 97

If all goes well during the coming month, update #97 will be the July 1 release of Office 365 for IT Pros (2024 edition). All the chapter authors are busy reviewing their material to strengthen the coverage we offer by including new material and pruning stuff that’s less important. It’s an exciting time of the year for the author team because we get the chance to make big changes that we mightn’t do in the middle of an edition, like restructuring a chapter. We also get to deal with the many questions, queries, and comments made by Vasil Michev as he goes through chapters with a fine tooth comb.

We hope that our 2023 subscribers like Update #96 and that you’ll stay with us during the journey through the 2024 edition from next July. Stay tuned for further information.

Learn how to exploit the data available to Microsoft 365 tenant administrators through the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. We love figuring out how things work.

Monthly Update #95 for the Most Comprehensive Office 365 Book Available

The Office 365 for IT Pros team is delighted to announce the availability of monthly update #95. The files for the May 2023 update are now available from Gumroad.com and Amazon Kindle. Details of the changes made to individual chapters are available in our change log.  We’d appreciate if subscribers download and use the updated content because a lot has changed over the last few months and it would be a pity to refer to old information after it has been updated. You can always access the latest files through your Gumroad account or by using the link in your original receipt. See our FAQ for more information.

Updates for Office 365 for IT Pros in April 2023

Like any month, April 2023 spanned several announcements that affect the operations of Microsoft 365 tenants. Here’s what we focused on:

• Microsoft provided new monthly active user numbers for Office 365 (382 million), Teams (300 million), and Enterprise Mobility and Security (250 million). Given the number of users with Azure AD Premium licenses (through EMS), many of the advanced Azure AD capabilities are available to large numbers of tenants.
• The app to migrate Teams wiki content to OneNote is available. Wiki content must be migrated before January 2024.
• The Teams admin center received a nice visual upgrade. We focused on the new options to renew teams reaching the end of their expiration period and to restore deleted teams before the 30-day deleted group retention period expires.
• Azure AD has shared user profiles to record who uses Azure AD Direct Connect to access information in other tenants and who from other tenants come into your tenant. Teams shared channels are the only app that use Azure AD Direct Connect at present, but this might change in future.
• As attacks like password sprays lose effectiveness due to the removal of basic authentication from Exchange Online, attackers use different techniques to try to compromise Azure AD accounts. Token theft is one such technique. A new session control called token protection is now in preview and might help by binding tokens to devices.
• Teams video chats now have autogenerated captions. This doesn’t sound like a major step forward, but it’s sometimes surprising how a small change makes a real difference. Try listening to a video chat message in a crowded place and you’ll see why. Microsoft also added Snapchat filters and a profanity filter for meetings, both examples of features that might be less useful.
• Bring your own domain allows tenants to use an email address and domain from their tenant for service messages instead of addresses like noreply@sharepointonline.com.
• If you haven’t started to replace cmdlets from the Azure AD and Microsoft Online Services modules, you’re behind the curve. The countdown to the June 30, 2023 retirement deadline is accelerating and some of the license management cmdlets are already suffering. Another PowerShell change is the depreciation of remote PowerShell for cmdlets connecting to the compliance endpoint, another good change that removes part of the legacy baggage that still exists within Office 365.

We continue to publish examples to help people who are refreshing PowerShell scripts to use the Graph APIs. Last month, we published an example of using the Graph to create a HTML report about managers and their direct reports.

Heading to Office 365 for IT Pros (2024 Edition)

The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook first appeared in 2015. We even had a print version then, something that’s impossible now given the volume and type of change that happens monthly. The size of the book is also a challenge for on-demand print runs, most of which are designed to cater for much smaller books (like novels). We moved to annual editions in 2016 and the current version is the ninth in the series.

We’ve started work on the tenth (2024) edition. If all goes well, we will deliver the new edition on July 1, 2023. We issue new editions on July 1 because it aligns with the start of the Microsoft fiscal year. We hope that our subscribers will stay with us for another year when the 2024 edition is available. Update #96 (June 1) will be the last update issued for the 2023 edition.

Thanks again for all your support of this venture. We could not produce the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook without our subscribers,

Files for Monthly Update #94 for the Most Comprehensive Office 365 Book Available for Download

The Office 365 for IT Pros team is delighted to announce the availability of monthly update #94. The files for the April 2023 update are now available from Gumroad.com and Amazon Kindle. Details of the changes made to individual chapters are available in our change log.  We’d appreciate if subscribers download and use the updated content because a lot has changed over the last few months and it would be a pity to refer to old information after it has been updated. You can always access the latest files through your Gumroad account or by using the link in your original receipt. See our FAQ for more information.

Major Microsoft Announcements in March

March 2023 featured several major Microsoft announcements that will affect Microsoft 365 operations over the coming years. The most important announcements are:

• Microsoft 365 Copilot: We don’t expect to see this in production until much later in the year, perhaps after the Ignite conference. No details are available about licensing. The Security Copilot announcement might also affect how Microsoft 365 organizations work in the future. There’s a lot of hype around artificial intelligence and machine learning at present, and we plan to take a pragmatic approach to assessing how the technology works when exposed to the rigors of day-to-day operations.
• The Loop app: Now in public preview, but Microsoft must resolve important issues like compliance and eDiscovery before general availability. Loop components are already available in OWA, Teams, Outlook desktop, and the Office web apps. The biggest issue we have with Loop technology is that it’s very inward-focused and currently doesn’t support collaboration with external people.
• The Teams 2.1 desktop client is now available in public preview. Many features work in the public preview but some major chunks of functionality are missing (like breakout rooms).
• The plan to block email from unsupported on-premises Exchange servers. Starting initially with Exchange 2007 servers in hybrid organizations, this plan will evolve to bring all Exchange on-premises servers into scope. Our recommendation is that hybrid organizations should eliminate unsupported Exchange servers from their roster as soon as possible.

We mention these changes in the current edition of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. However, there’s not much that we can say at this point about the operational and practical aspects of these technologies as they’re either incomplete or unavailable. We will keep a close eye on what happens and incorporate the information into future Office 365 for IT Pros updates as time goes by.

Other Changes

Alongside these important topics, day-to-day change continued unabated. Among the changes are:

• New licensing rules for Microsoft Teams Rooms devices come into effect on July 1, 2023.
• The Microsoft Entra admin center is replacing the Azure AD admin center.
• Authenticator lite is available in Outlook mobile clients to avoid the need to deploy the Microsoft Authenticator app when implementing multi-factor authentication.
• Detail about just what the Syntex-SharePoint Advanced management license covers is becoming available, like the block file download policy.
• Spatial audio is available in Teams meetings. You can also use green screen backdrops for Teams meetings – and mesh avatars are now in public preview (but don ‘t work with the Teams 2.1 client).
• The Microsoft 365 user profile card supports pronouns in apps like Teams and OWA.

We can only predict that a similar batch of changes will appear in April.

On to the 2024 Edition

The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook first appeared in 2015. We even had a print version then, something that’s impossible now given the volume and type of change that happens monthly. The size of the book is also a challenge for on-demand print runs, most of which are designed to cater for much smaller books (like novels). We moved to annual editions in 2016 and the current version is the ninth in the series.

We’ve started work on the tenth (2024) edition. If all goes well, we will deliver the new edition on July 1, 2023. We issue new editions on July 1 because it aligns with the start of the Microsoft fiscal year. We hope that our subscribers will stay with us for another year when the 2024 edition is available. Meanwhile, on to update #95 as we continue to improve the 2023 edition.

93^rd Monthly Update Released for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook

The Office 365 for IT Pros writing team is thrilled to announce the availability of the 93^rd monthly update for the eBook. Subscribers for the EPUB/PDF version can download the updated files from Gumroad.com while Kindle users can request the updates from Amazon. See our FAQ for more information about fetching updated files for the book.

Many Changes in February 2023

This past month was hectic in terms of the number and types of changes that emerged across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Our change log captures where changes occurred in book chapters. Some of the changes deserve highlighting. Here’s my take:

Microsoft announced the rebranding of Yammer as Viva Engage. The core functionality of Yammer won’t change as it comes under the Viva brand. Book publishers hate product rebranding because of the effect it has on text and graphics. The February edition (92) of Office 365 for IT Pros included more than 250 mentions of Yammer in the text. This update reduces that number significantly. In some cases, we need to wait for Microsoft’s rebranding to be complete.

As part of the Viva Engage rebranding, Microsoft introduced a new Viva Engage Core service plan as part of some licenses. The thought behind the new service plan was good in that it made sure that users who depend on Yammer-sourced services like the Q&A app in Teams could continue working. However, the new plan caused a lot of hassle for tenants where Yammer wasn’t used because suddenly Yammer was available to users. In any case, it was a good opportunity to test the license management cmdlets in the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK as we head towards the deprecation of the license management cmdlets in the Azure AD and MSOL modules at the end of March 2023.

Speaking of the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK, several foibles (some would call them bugs) exist that you should be aware of when converting scripts from the old Azure AD and MSOL modules. Or read chapter 23 of Office 365 for IT Pros and use the advice presented there. If you write code for Azure Automation runbooks, remember that Microsoft will pause out Run As accounts in September 2023.

A new Syntex advanced management license is on its way to control access to security and management features for SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. The license is currently in preview, so you can test features like setting a default sensitivity label for SharePoint document libraries or blocking file downloads from sites. Microsoft hasn’t said how much they plan to charge for Syntex advanced management.

In the world of Exchange Online, we learned that Microsoft restricts the creation of inbound connectors for new tenants. Apparently, this is because of some security concerns. The connectors are created but remain in a disabled state until approval is gained from Microsoft Support.

More positively, the new and improved recall message feature is rolling out. Unlike the previous version, the server processes message recall requests and promises a recall success rate of 90% against the 40% attained by the old code. Message recall only works within a tenant, but it’s nice to have something that has a high chance of working, even when recipients have read a message or filed it out of the inbox.

This month, we took a look at Mesh Avatars in Teams. Not everyone will like the idea of an avatar taking their place during Teams meetings (only visually). On the other hand, if you’re not looking your best, maybe an avatar is the right thing to use.

The Teams Premium license is now generally available even if some of its features are still not fully baked. This month, we looked at the premium meeting templates feature and how templates could be used to manage different types of meetings within large organizations. Also in relation to Teams premium, if you use the trial licenses to check out the premium features, make sure that you remove those licenses after the 30-day trial is over. It’s less confusing that way.

So Much Change All The Time

The list above is only a snapshot of what happened during February 2023. The volume and kind of change underlines the value of a living book. It’s tough to keep text updated but after 93 monthly updates we’re in a kind of a rhythm. At least, I think we are.

Support the work of the Office 365 for IT Pros team by subscribing to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. Your support pays for the time we need to track, analyze, and document the changing world of Microsoft 365 and Office 365.

Update #89 for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook

The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook team is thrilled to announce the availability of the 89th monthly update. Subscribers to the PDF/EUB edition can download the updated files from their Gumroad.com account or use the link in the receipt issued for their purchase. Those who bought the Kindle version from Amazon.com can request Amazon support to make the update available to them. See our FAQ for further information about obtaining book updates.

October Changes

Even though Microsoft declined to provide an updated number for Office 365 users (or paid seats) in their FY23 Q1 earnings briefing, there’s no doubt that the pace of change across Office 365 continues unabated. It’s true that many new features require add-on or high-end licenses as Microsoft attempts to extract more revenue from their installed base. This is a point that we consider when thinking about what content to add to the book: something that’s available to Office 365 E3 users is much more likely to be covered than an add-on for SharePoint Syntex. This doesn’t mean that we won’t cover interesting technical developments that need high-end licenses: it does mean that we think before we write anything about that topic.

The book’s change log gives a high-level view of the changes made in the Office 365 for IT Pros content chapters. Highlights in update #89 include:

• New features for Azure AD conditional access policies to give organizations more control over who connects to their tenant. These changes include updates for the Microsoft Authenticator app when processing MFA challenges.
• Coverage of inbox and sweep rules in Exchange Online.
• Rewritten description of administrator processing of quarantined messages.
• The Stream classic migration tool is now in public preview.
• New Business Scenarios API for Planner (essentially, application permissions for the existing API to allow customers to include code to create tasks in plans in their apps).
• The Teams Premium product ($10/user/month) gives customers who want more protection and security in meetings an extra option.
• Coverage of the new Teams Phone Mobile solution.
• Colors for sensitivity labels! Well, this feature was there before, but now it’s exposed in the Purview compliance portal and the Office (desktop click to run) apps, so we covered it.
• Included section covering the AI Builder for the Power Platform.
• Version 3.0 of the Exchange Online management PowerShell module supports managed identities, so we rewrote a couple of sections in the PowerShell chapter.
• The appendix was updated with data from the Microsoft FY23 Q1 results.

None of the above is particularly earth-shattering in terms of massive change. However, the thing to always remember about Office 365 is the amount of cumulative change as months pass. Announcements are made, details emerge, and new thinking evolves about how the service really works, all captured in Office 365 for IT Pros.

Update #90

The December 2022 update should bring some news of features announced by Microsoft at the Ignite 2022 conference that show up in tenants, There’s usually a delay of a month or so between enthusiastic announcement and initial reaction and the appearance of functioning code (in preview or GA) in tenants. The Thanksgiving holidays will slow things down a little, but we expect to see a bunch of new features appear during November. Stay tuned to learn more here and in Office 365 for IT Pros.

Thanks for Your Support

Without the support of our subscribers, we could not afford to spend the time we do on updating the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. Maintaining a book spanning some 675,000 words takes a lot of effort. No team could do that without help and we’re very grateful for the support that we receive. Thanks again!

Update #84 is the Last for the 2022 Edition

The Office 365 for IT Pros team is delighted to announce that the June 2022 update for the Office 365 for IT Pros (2022 edition) eBook is now available for subscribers to download. This is update #84 in the series going back to May 2015 and it is the last update we will issue for the 2022 edition.

Details of changes in the June 2022 update of Office 365 for IT Pros are available in our changelog. In some respects, we’re in the quiet before the storm period as a lower volume of change normally happens in Office 365 during the month of May. The storm breaks in June as Microsoft engineering groups rush to ship features and updates before the end of the Microsoft fiscal year on June 30. We’ll see if the trend continues in June 2022.

Subscribers to the EPUB/PDF version of Office 365 for IT Pros should use the link in their original Gumroad.com receipt or go to their Gumroad.com account to download the latest files. Version information is available on the inside front cover and on all page footers. For more information about downloading updates, please refer to our FAQ.

We did not update the companion volume this month.

We have updated the Kindle version on Amazon. You’ll have to ask Amazon for updates if you bought this version. Our continuing negative experiences with Amazon make us wonder if it’s worthwhile continuing with a Kindle version as it’s easy to move the EPUB version of the book to a Kindle. If you have an opinion, please share it in the comments.

2023 Edition Coming

As is our norm, July 1 will see the publication of a new edition of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. The chapter authors and technical editor are busy doing an end-to-end review of the book to remove old content and introduce new material. We conduct a similar review every year to create a new baseline for the book. The volume of change in Office 365 and the wider Microsoft 365 ecosystem is staggering and ranges from rebranding (like Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Entra) to fundamental shifts in technology.

As an example, because of the major change coming in Azure AD PowerShell, we are replacing every PowerShell example using the Azure AD and MSOL modules with either Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK cmdlets or Graph API commands. The work involves well over 400 examples, some of which won’t be done by July 1 because Microsoft has not yet made replacement cmdlets available or we haven’t found a simple Graph answer. However, there will be relatively few examples left for us to deal with in monthly updates after July. With an eye on Microsoft’s introduction of a new license management platform on August 26, we’ve completed all the license management examples.

Existing Subscribers and Updates

When we release the 2023 edition, we will send emails to current subscribers to allow them to extend their subscriptions to cover the new edition at a low cost. We deeply appreciate the ongoing support from subscribers. Over 81% of the subscribers for the 2021 edition signed on to extend their subscription for the 2022 edition, and we hope to earn the same trust and backing for the 2023 edition. Remember, the earlier you renew your subscription, the lower the price.

As is our norm, we have reduced the price of the 2022 edition to $39.95 for the month of June. This reflects the fact that we are finished with this edition, it’s become more like a “normal” book now, and the 2023 edition will replace it soon.

Back to Writing

We still have lots of work to do to prepare for the 2023 edition, so I shall stop now and go back and concentrate on that task. Happy downloads!

Eighth Update for 2022 Edition

The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook team is delighted to announce that the eighth update for the Office 365 for IT Pros (2022 Edition) eBook is now available. Subscribers for the EPUB/PDF version can download the updated files from their Gumroad.com account or by using the download link in their original receipt. We’ve updated the files on Amazon.com for our Kindle customers, but these need to contact Amazon to get the updates. The companion volume received a minor update. Full details about how to download updates can be found in our FAQ.

81^st Monthly Update

This update is the 81^st in a series stretching back to May 2015. Each month, we handle the same mixture of Microsoft updates to functionality, clarifications, delays, and new information or insights derived from experience gained with the Office 365 suite. The March 2022 update is no different, as you can see from our change log.

Changes varied from the introduction of Azure AD B2B cross-tenant settings (important for the preview of Teams shared channels in March) to Yammer groups coming under the control of the Microsoft 365 group expiration policy to the arrival of MTA-STS for Exchange Online. We also have Microsoft Search revealing Exchange messages in search results, including in Bing. In Teams, custom praise badges are no more, but loop components are generally available for chat (except for federated chats).

Another change is a feature which has not yet fully landed in tenants is that Microsoft increased the default retention time for Teams meeting recordings from 60 to 120 days. The extra time is based on customer feedback. Although most teams meeting recordings are never viewed, no one wants to go looking for the recording of an important meeting to find that it’s gone. If in doubt, use retention labels to ensure that Teams doesn’t remove recordings you want to keep.

On the programming front, we rewrote the section covering PowerShell and the Graph and added details about using Azure Automation with Microsoft 365. Finally, there’s an interesting update to sensitivity labels to control the default sharing link settings at a per-document level.

All of this plus a bunch of cleaning up, rephrasing, and removal of old text. It’s been a busy month. Next month (update 82) will continue apace. Although Teams shared channels will probably be the major new functionality which becomes available (in public preview) during March, the nature of Microsoft 365 is that new things happen all the time. For that reason, we produce a fully-updated Office 365 for IT Pros book each month. It’s the only way to keep abreast of what’s happening.

Meanwhile Prices Rise

Today, Microsoft increased the monthly subscription for many Office 365 and Microsoft 365 SKUs. For Office 365 E3 and E5, the rise is $3/user/month. Although that doesn’t sound a lot, the extra monthly charges mount up, so it’s wise to review the licenses your tenant uses with an eye on removing unused licenses where possible. In addition to composite licenses like Office 365 E3, review the use of add-ons like Microsoft Viva Topics and the advanced compliance features like communications compliance policies. It’s all great technology, but it’s surprising how much add-ons for a group of users increase a tenant’s monthly invoice from Microsoft.

Some people will immediately go to the old Microsoft Services Online (MSOL) PowerShell cmdlets to check licenses assigned to accounts. These cmdlets work but be aware that Microsoft plans to move to a new license management platform on June 30, 2022. When this happens, the old MSOL and Azure AD license management cmdlets will cease working. Microsoft recommends that you use the Microsoft Graph SDK for PowerShell to upgrade scripts by replacing the soon-to-be-deprecated cmdlets with cmdlets from the SDK. Here’s an example to start you off. Stay tuned for more information on this point in Office 365 for IT Pros updates!

Update #80 for World’s Best eBook Covering Office 365 and the Microsoft 365 Ecosystem

Drafting the announcement of yet another monthly update for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook and making the text interesting and different is a real challenge. After 80 monthly updates, seven of which are for the 2022 edition, you could say that we know how to process monthly updates. And we do. Every month. Each month throws up its own set of challenges, from authors being late submitting their chapter changes, to Word having a meltdown, or the OneDrive sync client becoming mildly confused. We suffer from the same minor crises that other Microsoft 365 users endure as we grapple with the cloud. But we persist and get the update done, which (boringly enough) has just happened (again).

The February 2022 update for Office 365 for IT Pros (2022 edition) is now available for subscribers of the EPUB/PDF version to download from their Gumroad.com account or by using the download link in the receipt received by email after subscribing. Amazon Kindle subscribers can ask Amazon to release the update to your account. See our FAQ for more details about downloading monthly updates.

About the Change Log

Changes made in the February 2022 update for Office 365 for IT Pros are described in the change log. We don’t note every edit, addition, or deletion across the 24 chapters, so the change log is more like a set of highlights rather than a comprehensive page-by-page notation of changes. For instance, we don’t usually note the fact when we remove text that we consider outdated, which happens all the time because of the way change occurs across Microsoft 365. We also don’t note tweaks made to text to improve its readability or to emphasize an important point, perhaps because someone has pointed out that we should (we love getting feedback from readers).

Although we do try to note the most important updates, life is too short for generating a tremendously detailed change log for a 650,000-word book, and we also doubt if people would read a very detailed change log. Suffice to say that more happens in a monthly update than meets the eye or gets written down.

Please Download and Use the Update

Which is one reason why we’d like subscribers to download and use the most recent text. You’ve paid us to deliver the most comprehensive and up-to-date material we can produce, so you deserve to take advantage of that content. Every month, we receive questions from Office 365 for IT Pros readers who cite information from an outdated version. Just like the Exchange development group have little sympathy for people who don’t install recent cumulative updates for on-premises Exchange servers, we don’t like getting questions already answered in available updates. In fact, it’s a little depressing, so please download and use the February 2022 update. We’d appreciate it if you do.

The Tide of Change Within the Microsoft 365 Ecosystem Keeps Advancing

Happy New Year!

Despite the traditional slowing of Microsoft 365 development activity during the holiday period, the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook team found many places to update the book and are happy to announce that the January 2022 update is now available. The change log contains details of chapter-by-chapter changes.

Subscribers to the 2022 edition can download the updated PDF and EPUB files from their Gumroad.com account or by using the download link in the receipt they received on purchase. See our FAQ for further information about downloading updates. We also updated the book on Amazon, but readers of that version must contact Amazon support to obtain access to the new file.

Seventy-Nine Updates

This is the 79^th monthly update for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook, spread across multiple editions since the original release in May 2015. We update the book text to keep it current and accurate to match what tenants experience inside Microsoft 365. Remember that the text reflects a tenant configured in targeted release mode and we do cover some preview features. However, everything you read should be available to a tenant with the appropriate licenses (a complex subject in its own right!).

As we keep on saying, although maintaining a monthly update cycle is tough going sometimes, it’s the only way to keep on top of what happens across the spectrum of the Office 365 apps and the surrounding Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Being always up to date is our unique selling point.

Please download and update the new files at your convenience and have a wonderful 2022.

Change Continues Throughout the Microsoft 365 Ecosystem

The Office 365 for IT Pros Team is delighted to announce the availability of the December 2021 update for Office 365 for IT Pros, 2022 edition. The updated files are available for download from Gumroad.com. Subscribers can use either the link in the receipt emailed to them when they bought the book or download from their Gumroad account. See our FAQ for more information about obtaining updates. We’ve also updated the Amazon Kindle version, but buyers of that version need to ask Amazon support to release the update to them.

The change log contains the full list of changes made for the 2022 edition. Suffice to say that even with the holiday shut down in the U.S., enough updates and new functionality appeared in our Office 365 tenants to keep us occupied in testing and documenting.

Microsoft Loop is probably the big new feature for the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. We don’t have the full-blown Microsoft Loop application yet, but Loop components are now generally available for Teams chat. We’ll keep a close eye on how Loop components spread into other parts of the ecosystem, with OWA and Teams channel conversations expected next.

Like every month, there’s a bunch of small changes scattered throughout the chapters. The devil in discussing anything technical to do with Office 365 truly lies in the detail, and it’s only by plugging away to keep on top of things and updating month after month that we have any change of keeping on top of things. This is the reason why we urge subscribers to download the updates as new files become available.

We have not updated the companion volume this month.

Enjoy the December update!

Latest Update for the Only eBook About the Microsoft 365 Office System Updated Monthly

The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook team is delighted to announce that the November 2021 update is now online and available for download. Subscribers to the EPUB/PDF version can download the updated files from Gumroad.com using their account or the link in their receipt. See our FAQ for more information about obtaining updated files. We did not update the companion volume this month.

Many Changes Since October

Even though we’re heading into the blizzard of announcements expected at this week’s Fall Microsoft Ignite event, there was still many developments to cover and update across the book chapters, including:

• New details of usage figures for Office 365 and other workloads like Azure AD and EM+S from the Microsoft FY22 Q1 results.
• More details about the Azure AD switchover to Monthly Active User billing for external identities.
• Preview of user feedback portal is available.
• Updated section about Exchange Online mailbox plans.
• Information about deprecation of Exchange Web Services APIs.
• More details about the removal of basic authentication for email protocols in October 2022.
• Updates for Microsoft Defender for Office 365 quarantine processing.
• SharePoint Online migration tool allows choice of target architecture before migration commences.
• Team channel management section rewritten.
• Lots of new content about using the Microsoft Graph SDK for PowerShell.
• New Planner ability to move tasks across groups.
• Auto-expiry policy for Teams meeting recordings is delayed until January 2022.
• Changes in how the SharePoint Online preservation hold library works.
• Content search using folder ids will be deprecated in November 2021.
• Updates for communications compliance policies.
• Exchange DLP policies will be removed from the EAC in mid-2022.
• Updates for Power App and Power Automate processing.
• Changes to logging audit records for Microsoft Information Protection activities.

In addition, many other small changes were made that don’t warrant a call-out. More comprehensive details of the changes are available in our change log.

By themselves, none of the changes are earth-shattering. However, over months, the volume of changes accumulated across all chapters plus the information about new and updated features added means that we end up with a very different book in June than we started with in July. The devil is truly in the detail, and it’s only by plugging away to keep on top of things and updating month after month that we have any change of keeping on top of things. This is why we urge subscribers to download the updates as new files become available.

Over the next few months, we’ll process the announcements Microsoft makes at Ignite to parse out how new features work, how they will impact tenant administration, and when the technology will be available. Expect the first set of changes reflecting this work to appear in the December update.

All the Latest News in the World’s Only Constantly Updated Book About Office 365

The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook team is delighted to announce the availability of the October 2021 update. Subscribers for the EPUB/PDF version can download the updated files from Gumroad.com. We have updated the Kindle file on Amazon, but if you bought the book there, you’ll have to ask Amazon support to make the file available. See our FAQ for more details about how to access updates.

September Changes

Demonstrating once again that Microsoft 365 changes constantly, September was a busy time for Office 365 for IT Pros. Apart from doing a ton of work to review and check text to improve flow and remove obsolete material in several chapters, we dealt with a steady flow of changes announced by Microsoft. Some of the changes were big and required a substantial alteration in a chapter. Many others were at the detail level and required changes to only a few words or sentences. Tracking down where to apply and update and what to say in an update often takes as long for a small change as it does for a big one, especially in a book covering so many workloads.

Taking Exchange Online as an example, we learned that Microsoft plans to block basic authentication for a range of email connectivity protocols from October 1, 2022 (SMTP AUTH is an exception), and that Microsoft will impose a new 1.5 TB limit on auto-expanding archive mailboxes on November 1, 2021. Throw in the retirement notice for the old Exchange admin center and a hotly-disputed report by a security researcher into a purported problem with Autodiscover, and there was plenty to think about.

Teams is in a state of perpetual evolution, or so it seems. A new Whiteboard app is available for Teams (along with Android and browser clients). Teams desktop clients running in preview mode now sport a P beside the user photo. You can now send quoted replies in Teams chat (but not channel messages). Customization for together mode background scenes is generally available. Fixing a real annoyance, Teams now updates the underlying folder in SharePoint when a channel is renamed. We also investigated the artifacts gathered for Teams webinars (like attendee lists) and documented how Teams makes these objects available for eDiscovery. Another search capability now available is looking for spoken words in Teams meetings. This isn’t yet available for eDiscovery, but you can look for words with SharePoint search now.

Change Log

A complete change log covering all chapters in Office 365 for IT Pros is available online.

Thanks to our subscribers for their ongoing support for the Office 365 for IT Pros project. We couldn’t continue to track and document changes across all apps without this support.

Please download the new files at your earliest convenience. We wouldn’t like you to manage tenants based on obsolete information! We updated the companion book in September, and those updated files are also available for downloading.

Only Constantly Updated eBook Keeps Improving

The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook team is delighted to announce the availability of the September 2021 update. Subscribers for the EPUB/PDF version can download the updated files from Gumroad.com. We have updated the Kindle file on Amazon, but if you bought the book there, you’ll have to ask Amazon support to make the file available. See our FAQ for more details about how to access updates.

August Changes

Like any month, August 2021 featured some interesting things to cover (and some that aren’t quite as interesting). Here’s a selection:

• Microsoft plans to raise its prices for Office 365 and Microsoft 365 in March 2022.
• A new legacy SMTP endpoint is being introduced for those who can’t upgrade to TLS 1.2.
• Exchange Online will enable plus addressing for all tenants in January.
• IE11 is no longer supported by Office 365.
• A new method is available to incorporate third-party attack simulator tools with Microsoft 365 Defender for Office 365.
• Live (fluid) components are coming to Office 365 apps, so we cover how to enable them.
• The Teams advanced communications add-on will become active in January 2022, so we cover what’s licensed by the add-on.
• Teams live captions and transcripts now support more languages than just U.S. English (but no sign of Irish English being supported…).
• Stream will start to remove the automatic transcripts for some older videos in September.
• Information barriers support is now available for SharePoint Online.
• Microsoft has released several limitations which existed for auto-label policies for sensitivity labels.

In addition, we updated a bunch of PowerShell code (snippets or complete scripts) to illustrate points and updated the last available SLA data for Office 365 (Q2 CY21). We also detected and suppressed some annoying typos that had crept into text and some misformatting of figure references in Chapter 22. The complete change log is available online.

Thanks to our subscribers for their ongoing support for the Office 365 for IT Pros project. We couldn’t continue to track and document changes across all apps without this support.

Please download the new files at your earliest convenience. We wouldn’t like you to manage tenants based on obsolete information!

Now we start to process the September changes. The cloud never stays static!

It’s the start of the month, so it must be time to release an update for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. We start a new cycle of monthly updates with the first update for Office 365 for IT Pros (2022 edition), now available to be downloaded from Gumroad.com by our EPUB/PDF subscribers. We did not update the companion volume in this cycle, so all subscribers need to download are the updated EPUB and PDF files. See https://office365itpros.com/faq for details about how to download updated files. The update status of the book files is shown in the footer of each page (PDF) or the inside front cover (EPUB).

We also updated the Kindle version, but purchasers of this book need to ask Amazon support for access to the new files.

Changes in August 2021

Like every update, the changes covered for August 2021 span a range of topics (see below). We also fixed some annoying bugs that we found in the formatting of Chapter 13.

Being able to issue monthly updates is a luxury afforded by the ePublishing model that makes sure that Office 365 for IT Pros is always up to date and current. We exploit our ability to continually update text to describe new features, add new tips and techniques, and ensure that our readers have the most insightful coverage of Office 365 technology available in any book anywhere.

Work has already started to prepare the September update to cover some important features Microsoft will ship during August. The great things about Office 365 and the wider Microsoft 365 ecosystem is that we never run out of new things to analyze, report, and dissect. We’re looking forward to working through our task list, and we hope that our subscribers will appreciate this month’s updates and the others they’ll receive for the duration of the 2022 edition.

Author Team Busy Working on 2022 Edition

Today, we shipped the last monthly update for the 2021 edition of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. Subscribers can download the updated files from their Gumroad account. If you bought the Kindle version, please ask Amazon support for the updated file. More information about getting updates is available in our FAQ.

As described in our change log, the June 2021 update covers 19 of 24 chapters. The eleven monthly updates issued for the 2021 edition span a total of 230 chapter updates ranging from very small (fix some formatting errors or minor typos) to very large (include descriptions of new features issued by Microsoft). We’ve added roughly 25,000 words to the book since it was issued on July 1, 2020. During the last year, we also built up the Office 365 for IT Pros PowerShell script repository by moving many examples of scripts out of book tex into the repository to make them more accessible to anyone who wants to use them.

In a nutshell, lots of work to track, analyze, and report on change across the entire Office 365 ecosystem, including large bits of Microsoft 365 like Azure AD and Microsoft Information Protection.

There’s no way that the traditional publishing model can cope with the number and type of changes that we see across Office 365. A good example of the reason why is in the June update. Microsoft updated the user interface for content searches and Core eDiscovery during the month. Not only does the new interface work differently, it also removes some functionality. We’ve updated Chapter 20 to reflect the new situation.

After a year’s work, we’re finished with the 2021 edition and will issue no further updates unless we discover a fundamental error in the text between now and July 1, 2021. On that date, we publish the 2022 edition, the eighth in the sequence since we started working on the book in 2014. I don’t think we ever anticipated that we’d still be quite so busy at this point.

New Authors

Two new authors have joined the writing team for the 2022 edition. Christina Wheeler takes over the Power Platform chapter from Gustavo Velez, who’s stepping down to concentrate on his book covering recipes for Office 365 development (available on Amazon or Guitica.com), and Gareth Gudger takes over the mail flow chapter. We wish Gustavo continued success with his book and welcome Christina and Gareth to the team.

Extending Subscriptions for the 2022 Edition

When we issue the 2022 edition, current subscribers will be offered a time-limited opportunity to extend their subscription for $14.95 to cover another year. We deeply appreciate the support received from subscribers who renew. The income enables the writers to spend time figuring out how Office 365 really works, and to keep on going back to investigate how things change as Microsoft updates their code.

Reduced Price for Office 365 for IT Pros (2021 Edition) in June

Because the 2021 edition will receive no further updates, we have dropped the price of the book to $35 for June. The normal price will be restored upon the release of the 2022 edition in July. Effectively, this means that new buyers can purchase the 2021 edition now and upgrade to the 2022 edition for the same price as they would have paid for the 2021 edition in May. We think it’s both a good and fair deal.

Microsoft Reports Over 300 Teams Changes in the Last Year

During his remarks to analysts following Microsoft’s FY21 Q3 results, CEO Satya Nadella observed that Teams had added “over 300 features over the past year.” Although you can’t help but be impressed at the volume of new features created, tested, and deployed by Teams engineering, the sheer number of updates threatens to overwhelm Office 365 tenants at times. Every time you turn around, Teams has changed.

The problem is compounded by the volume of changes flowing for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Planner, Yammer, Microsoft 365 Groups, Forms, Whiteboard, Azure AD, and anything else which might contribute to Microsoft’s cloud ecosystem. Collectively, a tenant might face dealing with over five hundred updates annually.

Both Small and Large Changes

It’s not as if the changes are small updates either. Some, like the introduction of Viva Topics, represent important new functionality. Others, like the transition of video storage from Stream to OneDrive for Business, affect the way people work, while it’s hard to put a value on other changes like the increase in Planner labels from six to 25.

It’s certain that change with the Microsoft 365 ecosystem will continue. When we started on the road to build the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook in 2014, we could already see that the cloud versions of Microsoft server applications developed faster than their cloud counterparts. Change became faster when Microsoft cut the ties between the on-premises and cloud code bases for Exchange and SharePoint in 2016 or thereabouts and began to develop cloud-only apps like Teams and Planner. We can confidently predict that what tenants see today won’t be the same that they will see in a year’s time. Or even in six months.

May Update for Office 365 for IT Pros

The degree of ongoing change within the ecosystem is why we update the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook every month. We believe that we are the only team covering Office 365 using a monthly republishing cycle for our eBook. Now spanning over 1,300 pages, Office 365 for IT Pros is packed full of practical and most importantly, up-to-date knowledge and guidance about Office 365, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Teams, Planner, Azure AD, PowerShell, the Microsoft Graph, and many other topics.

We have just released the May 2021 update for Office 365 for IT Pros (2021 edition). Subscribers to our EPUB/PDF version can download the refreshed files from Gumroad using their account or the link in the receipt emailed to the address provided at the time of purchase. We have not updated the companion volume for May. Buyers of the Amazon Kindle version must ask Amazon support to make the new file available. See our FAQ for more information about how to download updates.

The May 2021 update contains changes to 20 of the 24 content chapters. Details of the change are available in the change log.

The writing team is moving forward with plans for the 2022 edition. We believe that we will release this edition on July 1, 2021. Before then, we will deliver the last (June) update for the 2021 edition early next month.

Happy reading!

Every Chapter Updated This Time Round

The Office 365 for IT Pros writing team is happy to announce the availability of the April update for Office 365 for IT Pros (2021 edition). This is the ninth update we’ve issued for this edition and it’s a big one. We’ve updated every one of our 24 content chapters for April, which makes this the biggest ever update we have done. Some chapters are more heavily updated than others, but the big message is that change is pervasive across Office 365. You can’t afford to turn around for risk missing out on something, which is why we republish the book every month. We are the only Office 365 book to issue monthly updates and we’ve done this for six years. You could say that it’s become a habit.

Fetching Updates

Subscribers who bought the EPUB/PDF version of the book can download the updated files from Gumroad.com using their Gumroad account or the link in the receipt received when they bought the book. Kindle subscribers must contact Amazon support to arrange for the updates to be made available to their device (we don’t make the rules). See our FAQ for more information about how to retrieve updates.

Change List

Here’s a brief list of the changes in the April 2021 update. The changes made since the first publication of the 2021 edition are in our change log.

The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook team is delighted to announce that the eighth update for Office 365 for IT Pros (2021 edition) is now available. Remember that every month we make a completely new book available to our subscribers with all the changes and new information integrated in the right place. Office 365 for IT Pros is the only book offering such an extensive update service.

Subscribers to the EPUB/PDF version can download the updated files from their Gumroad account. The link to download the files is also in the original receipt issued for the book. We have not updated the companion book this month.

Amazon Kindle subscribers can ask Amazon support to make the updated files available.

Almost Every Chapter Updated

Despite being a short month and one which you might expect to be quiet as Microsoft prepared for the virtual Ignite event, updates are present for 23 of the 24 chapters. The updates include new functionality such as template policies for Teams and Exchange Online health monitoring. We’ve also taken the opportunity to rewrite several sections across different chapters to improve their clarity and include new information. Finally, we have adjusted text where necessary because Microsoft has slipped dates for new features, such as the transition from Stream classic to OneDrive for the storage of Teams meeting recordings.

We’ll include coverage of anything Microsoft announces at Ignite in future updates.

Additional Resources

Additional resources are available online:

Office 365 for IT Pros FAQ

Office 365 for IT Pros Change log

Office 365 for IT Pros code example GitHub repository

TEC 2021 Waitlist Now Available

Many of our team will be involved in the TEC 2021 conference in September. You can register for the conference waitlist now.

Changes in the March Update

Here’s the set of changes included in the March update for Office 365 for IT Pros (2021 edition).

It can be hard to become fluent in PowerShell, especially when working with a service where multiple modules (all with their own kinks) are used. However, PowerShell is very approachable and it’s surprising what you can do with just a couple of lines of code. Working examples are great learning tools to help PowerShell newcomers (and maybe experienced coders) come up with solutions to problems. A couple of years ago, we created the Office 365 for IT Pros GitHub repository. Since then, we’ve been populating the repository with PowerShell scripts created to illustrate new features or to demonstrate how to approach solving an administrative problem in an Office 365 tenant. The repository currently holds a collection of 81 scripts.

Apart from referencing scripts in the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook or writing articles to explain what a script does, we haven’t created any documentation. That gap is now closed with the publication of our GitHub script listing page, which lists the scripts alphabetically and gives a short explanation what each script does. We also link to a relevant article if one is available. We will update this page as new scripts are added to our collection.

Not Production Scripts

The scripts are not intended for production work. Instead, the code is intended to demonstrate how Office 365 features work and is part of our learning journey to understand and master functionality before we write about it. Writing scripts to interact with a component usually reveals something new and interesting. At least, that’s been our experience. The collection contains scripts for working with Azure AD, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Teams, Planner, and OneDrive for Business. We use a mixture of pure PowerShell and PowerShell combined with Microsoft Graph and other APIs.

Every tenant has a different approach to using PowerShell and any script needs to fit into the tenant framework before it can be used to do real work. The code we write works, but it might need some additional error handling or logging, or you might want to take some code and incorporate it into your scripts.

Those working in large tenants where the need exists to process tens of thousands of objects should consider taking the code explored in the scripts and using them with techniques such as those outlined in this post. Many of our scripts interrogate the audit log to extract information about actions such as user sign-ins or document edit. In large tenants where many thousands of audit records are generated daily, you may have to limit the timeframe for searches or use paging to download more than 5,000 records at a time. You’ll find this stuff out when you test a script before deciding if it’s useful.

Some Example Scripts

Among the scripts in the repository are:

• FindPotentialDirectoryProblems.PS1: This script scans Azure Active Directory to look for accounts which don’t have common attributes (like phone numbers or departments) populated. The idea is that the People Card and other Microsoft 365 features depend heavily on accurate Azure AD data, so it’s a good idea to make sure that the basics are done for all accounts. See this post for more information.
• GetBingImagesTeamsBackgrounds.PS1: Bing publishes nice images daily to use as the background for its home page. The same images often make good custom backgrounds for Teams meetings. This script downloads and installs the Bing daily images in the folder used for Teams custom backgrounds and removes old images after 30 days. See  for more information.
• PurgeMessagesWithContentSearch.PS1: Microsoft is busy getting rid of the Search-Inbox cmdlet, and the replacement is to use a content search to find items you want to purge and a content search action to purge the found items. This script shows how to do the job. This post covers the basics.
• ReportTeamsCreationbyEmail.ps1: A script to look back over the last 90 days and find audit records for the creation of new teams. An email message is created with details of the new team and is sent to a nominated recipient. See this article for more details.
• TeamsGroupsActivityReport.ps1: This script was created soon after the launch of Office 365 Groups and published in the TechNet Gallery. Its documentation is available here. The script was moved to GitHub after the retirement of the TechNet Gallery and is now at version 4.8. This version uses PowerShell exclusively and is therefore limited by the speed constraints of some cmdlets like Get-UnifiedGroup. It works, but the Graph-based version is much faster.
• TeamsGroupsActivityReportV5.PS1: The Graph-based (and much faster) edition of the Teams and Microsoft 365 Groups Activity Report script. To gain speed and be able to process tens of thousands of groups in a reasonable time, the original script was rewritten to use Graph API calls whenever possible. As such, it’s a good working example of how to swap out heavy PowerShell cmdlets for more performant Graph calls in a script.

Please Contribute

One of the delights of PowerShell is that it’s easy for people to write scripts (well, it is with a little practice). GitHub enables people to suggest ideas and propose changes to code, and we welcome any suggestions we receive to improve the scripts in the repository. We definitely appreciate any fixes for bugs found in our code. No one is perfect!

Please Download Updates ASAP

The Office 365 for IT Pros team is delighted to announce the availability of the December 2020 update for the 2021 edition. This is the fifth monthly update issued for the 2021 edition and it contains updates for 23 of the 24 content chapters. Given the number of changes, we recommend that our EPUB/PDF subscribers connect to Gumroad.com to download the updated files as soon as convenient. The link in your original receipt or your Gumroad.com account always downloads the current files.

Full details of the changes are available in our Change Log. More advice about how to download the latest files is available in our FAQ.

Amazon.com buyers should ask Amazon to make the updated files available to your device.

Email Notifications

We email notifications to subscribers as soon as the files are created and we’re happy that they look good. Depending on how well the production process works, this is usually about 12 hours ahead of the planned publication date.

Some subscribers have told of us difficulties receiving email updates from Gumroad.com and therefore might not be aware when updates become available. Please check your email filtering and quarantining configuration to ensure that email from Gumroad.com is not being blocked. Unfortunately, it’s a downside of using a platform like Gumroad that some email appears like spam.

Thanks!

Thank you for your continued support of the Office 365 for IT Pros project. We couldn’t dedicate the hours we spent hunting down information about new features and updates within Office 365 without the backing we receive from subscribers. We really appreciate the support!

It’s doesn’t seem like a month has passed since we published Office 365 for IT Pros (2021 Edition), but the time to issue the first monthly update has arrived. Updated book files dated August 1 are now available for subscribers to download from Gumroad.com. Please use the links in your Gumroad account or the original receipt you received to download your copies. See our FAQ for further information about updates. We did not update the companion volume this month.

If you bought the Kindle version of the book from Amazon, you can ask Amazon to make the updated files available to you.

August Updates

The August update includes changes to 18 of the 24 content chapters.

Although this looks like the book received many updates, it’s typical of the number and variety of updates we process monthly. Office 365 applications don’t stop changing, so we don’t stop updating.

Seventh (2021) Edition of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook Available Now

New Microsoft Fiscal Year, New Version of Office 365 for IT Pros

We publish Office 365 for IT Pros on a yearly schedule with a new edition every July to coincide with Microsoft’s fiscal year. Many Microsoft engineering activities focus on year end, so it makes sense for us to align on the same date. No one else tries to document Office 365 the way we do with monthly updates covering the breath of Office 365. For the 2020 edition, those updates spanned 200 major chapter changes. In other words, we practically rewrote the book over the last year.

To give an indication of why we updated so much, over the last four months we have used the integration between Planner and the Message Center in the Microsoft 365 admin center to track the notifications Microsoft sends to Office 365 tenants. In that time, 314 tasks have been created. There are some duplicates, and extra tasks are created when Microsoft updates notifications after dates shift. Even so, Microsoft has notified tenants about more than 250 different changes since January 2020. Tracking change has never been more difficult.

Six Weeks of Effort Delivers a Refreshed Book

Over the last six weeks, the writing team and our indefatigable technical editor have been busy going through the 600,000 words of the 2020 edition to add new content, modify or move text where needed, and trim old or outdated material. We looked at every screen shot and took new ones where necessary. We checked every PowerShell example and updated the code if we found bugs or new ways of approaching problems. We also moved some of our larger examples to our GitHub repository to make it easier for people to download and use the code. The last changes to text were made at 21:00 UTC on June 30, just getting in under the deadline for updates. It was a tough time.

The good news is that we have a great book, packed full of information. We’re confident that this is our best edition yet. The content is updated, it’s arranged in a more logical fashion, and it’s brimming with tips and inside information. None of the writers has violated their Microsoft NDA to reveal information that we shouldn’t, but we do describe what we’ve found about the technology as we work with it in what we hope is a practical and approachable manner.

Subscribers Please Renew!

Selling yearly subscriptions to the book helps pay for the time and effort we need to research, test, and write about Office 365 and the wider Microsoft 365 ecosystem. The resulting funding makes sure that we can release monthly updates to ensure that the latest information is available to subscribers.

We have sent notices to existing subscribers of the EPUB/PDF version to let them know how to extend their subscription for the 2021 edition. As previously announced, people who bought a full-price copy in June will receive a code to include the 2021 edition in their subscription. Unfortunately, we can do nothing for those who bought the Kindle version of the book. We have no idea who bought the Kindle version as Amazon controls the relationship with the customer and we have zero visibility about any sales. If you’re in this category, please consider transferring your allegiance to the EPUB/PDF version and use one of the many online services available to convert the EPUB file to MOBI format, which can be read on Kindle devices.

If you’re not a current subscriber, we’d love if you’d join our growing community. All support is most gratefully received. Head to our Gumroad.com page to get your copy of Office 365 for IT Pros (2021 Edition).

An Author’s Perspective

Working on large book projects is something I’ve had occasion to do a lot over the last 25 or so years (yikes!) The Office 365 for IT Pros book is unique not only because it gets monthly updates, but also because of the way we do annual revisions.

Here’s how the sausage gets made.

Scheduling Progress

First, let’s talk about the schedule. We release each year’s edition at the beginning of July. That’s a hard deadline that we’ve all agreed to. So starting in March-ish, we meet as an editorial team to decide whether we need any structural changes to the whole book. This usually results in some good-natured argument because even with a 1200+ page book we can’t cover everything that Microsoft does. We have to choose what to include and what to skip. In past years, we’ve had these discussions at the MVP Summit in Redmond. Unfortunately, you all know why that wasn’t possible this year!

When Microsoft adds a major new workload or feature, that’s a good candidate for inclusion. If they deprecate or replace something, that’s a good candidate for a drop. But sometimes we have to make judgment calls. For example, the Exchange ActiveSync coverage from the clients chapters was relegated to the 2021 companion volume because in a world that has Intune and M365 MDM, it’s just not that important any more. We went through a similar process when Exchange Unified Messaging died its sad and undeserved death.

Multiple Author Perspectives

Where things get interesting is that each author has a unique perspective on which parts of Microsoft 365 are most important, yet we’re all battling to keep the book to a reasonable size for readers. I might argue for adding or removing coverage in someone else’s chapter, and vice versa, and all those arguments have to be managed. Tony is a firm but fair arbiter when we disagree over how much coverage to give any particular topic.

(side note: of course, since the book is really a two-volume book, and purchasers get both together, we get to keep interesting or useful material that’s not quite ready to be cut without adding unwanted bulk to the main book– something impossible to do with dead-tree books.)

Oh, yes– we also choose a title and a cover photo. But you’ll have to wait to see those, I think…. we have to keep some surprises.

Working on Chapters

So.. after we make the team decision on how the book should be structured, each of us goes off to work on the individual chapters we own. Each author has a free hand to decide what topics to cover in their chapters and how they’re structured. We work together to ensure smooth coverage; for example, in the clients chapter I talk about the importance of split tunnels for VPN connectivity, and Stale’s coverage of split tunneling builds on mine to flesh out more details in his chapters on Teams.

One of the big parts of the annual revision is improving the organization and structure. For example, the clients chapter for 2021 is completely restructured top-to-bottom, and the Intune chapter is too, to make them easier to read and more clear—and also to make it easier to add new content in the future. Because we update the text monthly, we often say things like “In November 2019, Microsoft changed the XYZ feature to accept Twinkies as payment” so that readers will notice the latest changes. By the following summer, that reference a) probably seems dated and b) is probably wrong because Microsoft changed things four more times since the original version. The annual refresh is a good time for us to clean up outdated dates and refresh the text to keep it relevant and technically correct.

The Goodness of a Technical Edit

Once each refreshed chapter is done (including new screenshots, line art, PowerShell code samples, and so on), it goes to our technical editor, Vasil Michev.

Vasil is too smart to waste time on Twitter, so he may not see me say this, but he has maybe the most critical job in the whole book: looking for errors, omissions, or problems with the text as written. Of course, each author is ultimately responsible for their own mistakes but Vasil does a superb job of finding small, and occasionally large, problems so we can fix them before print.

After the tech edit pass, the author gets the chapter back with embedded comments, which we then have to handle by fixing mistakes or typos, clarifying things, and so on. This is no different than any document editing you may ever have done. Depending on the size of the changes, this may be a simple matter of fixing a few typos or writing a chunk of new material to ensure coverage of something important.

At that point, the chapter is “done”. I put “done” in quotes because Microsoft is always changing the service, and just because we think the chapter is done at any point in time doesn’t mean that we can ignore Microsoft updates. It’s common for us to be making last-minute changes up until the day of the book’s release, although we try not to overdo it because of the overhead involved in building the complete book each time a chapter changes.

Tools We Use

As you might expect, we use the tools we write about– we use Teams as our operating environment, Planner to track task assignments, and so on. In fact, nearly the only parts of the book’s production and workflow that don’t depend on Microsoft are this blog (powered by WordPress) and our storefront, powered by Gumroad. This process is complicated a little by the fact that many of us are using pre-production releases of various Microsoft services, so we run into bugs, incomplete features, and so on more than you’d expect in a typical deployment… but that’s all part of testing and learning the service well enough to be able to write about it.

Towards the 2021 Edition

I’m excited about the 2021 edition, and we have a lot of interesting and useful new material in this edition. Just in my own chapters, here’s a partial list: better coverage of the Office Client Policy service, coverage of split tunneling for VPNs, more depth on how to manage Microsoft 365 using Endpoint Manager, an introduction to Azure Cloud Shell, a brand-new chapter on adoption, and coverage of the new Exchange PowerShell v2 cmdlets). To help you get the best possible value, we’re running a special promotion: buy the 2020 edition now and you’ll get the 2021 edition at no extra cost. As always, we’re looking out for previous buyers too– if you already bought the 2020 edition, we’ll be offering a solid discount on purchase of the upgrade to 2021.

We appreciate the support we have had from our subscribers and hope that you will continue that support with Office 365 for IT Pros 2021 edition!

With the assistance of our book sponsors, Quest Software, the Office 365 for IT Pros team is happy to announce that anyone who buys the 2020 edition in June 2020 will receive a free upgrade to the 2021 edition when we release this edition in July 2020.

The way the scheme works is:

• You buy a full-price subscription for the 2020 edition of Office 365 for IT Pros from Gumroad.com.
• You’ll be able to download the latest files, recently updated for June 2020.
• When we release the 2021 edition, we’ll send you a code to allow you to download the 2021 edition free.

Effectively, we take your 2020 subscription, which only lasts another month, and extend it for the full 12 months covering the subscription to the 2021 edition. This offer does not apply to people who buy the Kindle version of the book. Amazon controls all aspects of the purchase workflow for Kindle and we have zero visibility over who buys the Kindle version.

Subscribers who bought Office 365 for IT Pros (2020 edition) before June 1, 2020 will receive a low-cost upgrade offer. It won’t be free, but it will be reasonable.

Why We Use a Subscription Model

People might ask why we use the subscription model for Office 365 for IT Pros. We believe that any version of the book is the best available book covering Office 365 tenant management available today. We could sell the book in the normal manner as a simple transaction. You pay us and you get a copy.

However, the subscription model allows us to continually update the book because it gives us a flow of funding to pay our writers and editors for the time spent monitoring change across the Office 365 workloads and associated technology. Changes need to be understood, analyzed, checked, and then written about in a way that fits into the book. To put this work into context, for the 2020 edition we:

• Released eleven monthly updates to subscribers. Not every subscriber downloads every update, but they’re available when you want to fetch the latest files.
• Created 195 chapter updates, meaning that each chapter was updated more than eight times over the year. Some updates were very big, others small. The point is that the entire book was heavily revised over the year.
• Added a net 52,264 words (the June 2020 update spans 600,883 words) to the book content (63 pages). Some content was removed during the year, but overall, we grew the book content by about 10% to reflect new functionality added to Office 365 over the year.

All of this takes up a lot of time and regretfully that time needs to be paid for. On the upside, we get to issue updates monthly to make sure that Office 365 for IT Pros stays up to date.

We appreciate the support we have from our subscribers and hope that you will continue that support with the 2021 edition.

Eleventh Update for 2020 Edition Available for Download Now

The Office 365 for IT Pros team proudly announces the delivery of the eleventh update for Office 365 for IT Pros (2020) Edition, the world’s best and only constantly updated book about Office 365. This is the last update for the 2020 edition as we are now working on the 2021 edition with the aim to release it on July 1, 2020. Current subscribers will receive a code after we release the 2021 edition to allow them to upgrade at low cost.

Fifteen of the 24 content chapters are refreshed in this update, including tidying up some loose ends (aka “typos”) created during the massive refresh in May 2020. Full details are available on our change log.

EPUB/PDF Download Available from Gumroad

Subscribers who bought through Gumroad.com can download the updated files (in effect, a completely new book) from their Gumroad account. See our FAQ for more information on this process. We recommend that subscribers download and use the updated files as soon as you can. There’s no point in paying for a subscription service to receive updates if you don’t use them.

Woes with Amazon

Uploaded files are also available for Kindle readers on Amazon. However, as we have noted many times in the past, Amazon is not the most helpful partner in the world when it comes to allowing people access to updated files. Indeed, this month Amazon decided to block the companion volume for Office 365 for IT Pros on the basis that “your books do not meet our content quality guidelines because they do not contain significantly differentiated content.”

I’m sure Amazon uses some AI techniques to detect problems in books, but the AI failed abysmally in this instance to differentiate between a book containing 600K words (the main book) and one with 163K words (the companion volume). This, and the horrible support experience dealing with Amazon’s KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) team, along with issues making updated content available to readers make us recommend that you don’t buy from Amazon. Instead, if you want to read the book on Kindle, follow the advice in the FAQ to convert the EPUB version and load the converted file to your Kindle device.

Please contact Amazon support if you want the updated files. And while you’re at it, please let Amazon know that you disapprove of their decision to block the companion volume. Thanks for your support!

Refresh for the Entire Book

The Office 365 for IT Pros writing team is delighted to announce the availability of the 10^th update for the 2020 edition.

One thing we’re sure about is that Microsoft will continue to update Office 365. The pace of change has not slackened and the number of notifications appearing in the Microsoft 365 admin center continues (we recommend the integration between the Message Center and Planner to help track new developments)

The 10^th update is a massive effort with changes applied to 23 of the 24 content chapters (the remaining chapter was changed, but only with some small updates and we don’t count those). You can consider this update to be a complete refresh of the 2020 edition. Full details are available on our change log.

Subscribers who bought through Gumroad.com can download the updated files from their Gumroad account. See our FAQ for more information on this process. We recommend that subscribers download and use the updated files as soon as you can. There’s no point in paying for a subscription service to receive updates if you don’t use them.

Uploaded files are also available for Kindle readers on Amazon. However, as we have noted many times in the past, Amazon is not the most helpful partner in the world when it comes to allowing people access to updated files. For this reason, we recommend that you don’t buy from Amazon and follow the advice in the FAQ to convert the EPUB version to Kindle instead.

2021 Edition Coming

The 10^th update is the last big update for the 2020 edition. We will publish one more update on June 1, 2020. After that, we will concentrate on the 2021 edition, which is scheduled to appear on July 1, 2020. Stay tuned for more information!

Ninth Update Issued for the Only Office 365 Book That Constantly Changes

The writing team is delighted to announce that we have completed the ninth update for Office 365 for IT Pros (2020 edition). Subscribers who bought the EPUB/PDF version can download the updated files from their Gumroad.com account while purchasers of the Kindle version can ask Amazon to make the updates available to them.

Please consult the change log for details of the changes in this release. The FAQ has information that you might find interesting about how to download updates.

Large Number of Chapter Changes

The ninth update refreshes 17 of the 24 content chapters. Apart from major changes spread across the book, there are many smaller changes and quality improvements (our name for fixing typos). Please download and use the updated files at your convenience.

We have also updated the companion volume. The current version of this volume is dated 1 April 2020 and the updated files are also available on Gumroad.com. A Kindle version of the companion volume is also available.

Another Big Update for the Most Up-to-date Book Covering Office 365

The Office 365 for IT Pros writing team is happy to announce that the March 2020 update for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook (2020 edition) is now available. This is the eighth update issued for the book. Subscribers for the PDF/EPUB version can download updated files from Gumroad.com while those who have bought the Kindle version from Amazon can ask Amazon to make the updated files available (we continue to have difficulties persuading Amazon to advise purchasers when updates are issued). See our FAQ https://office365itpros.com/faq/ for more information about accessing updates.

This update includes changes to 18 of the 24 chapters. The changes are described in our change log https://office365itpros.com/change-log/. We strongly encourage subscribers to download and use the latest files to ensure that you are fully informed about what’s happening inside Office 365.

You can identify the update number by looking at the inside front cover of the book where you’ll see This is update 8 for the 2020 Edition published on 2 March 2020. The PDF version also includes the update number at the bottom of each page.

A Change in Sponsor

This release marks a new sponsor for the book: Quadrotech has passed the torch to Quest Software. While we are delighted to work with a new sponsor, it’s also important to acknowledge the support we’ve received from Quadrotech since 2016 which has helped the writing team dedicate the time necessary to investigate multiple aspects of Office 365 and document our findings. We look forward to working with Quest in the same positive and productive manner.

Seventh Update for 2020 Edition Updates 75% of Chapters

The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook team is proud to announce the availability of the seventh update for the 2020 edition. Updated files are now available for subscribers to download from Gumroad.com (PDF and EPUB version) and we have also updated Amazon with the Kindle edition. Kindle subscribers will have to ask Amazon to make the updated files available to them. Amazon’s attitude to technical books that are updated frequently is one of the reasons why we don’t like them very much. Our FAQ has more information about how to download updates.

The February release updates 18 of the 24 content chapters, or 75% of the book. The change log describes all the monthly updates for the 2020 edition. Some of the updates are small like the increasing Office 365 revenues revealed in Microsoft’s Q2 FY20 results, and some are more important, such as the increasing reach of Office 365 sensitivity labels across the service. As always, we have made minor changes in many chapters to improve the text, increase accuracy, and to create an update that web believe is all-round as up-to-date as we can make it.

February is a short month, but that doesn’t mean that we will have any fewer updates. Already we see some work to do to keep pace with what’s happening across all the apps.

As always, we would appreciate if subscribers could download the updated files to make sure that you have the latest information available to you.

Fifteen Chapters Updated

Returning to normal service after the holiday season, the Office 365 for IT Pros writing team is pleased to announce the release of the sixth update for the Office 365 for IT Pros (2020 Edition) eBook. The update is dated 6 January 2020. Subscribers can download the updated EPUB and PDF files from Gumroad.com while Kindle readers can update their books from Amazon. See our FAQ for more information about the update process.

Although Microsoft shut down for the holidays and froze the code deployed inside Office 365, we still had plenty to cover due to software changes released during December. As always, we learned more about Office 365 and incorporated these tips and insights into the text. Among the changes are:

• How Exchange Online auto-processes updates for calendar meetings.
• The new OneDrive for Business Request Files feature.
• The lack of a sync control in the Outlook for Mac client.
• Using Sensitivity Labels to classify Office 365 Groups, Teams, and sites.
• How Sensitivity Labels can block guest access to sensitive groups.
• Final details and dates for the migration from Office 365 Video to Stream.
• Citrix and VMware announcements that affect Teams Meetings.
• PDF support for Office 365 Message Encryption.

As a result, 15 of the 24 content chapters are updated in this release. Full details of the changes are available in the book’s change log.

Working on the February 2020 Update

Now that everyone is back to work, we expect a further set of software changes and new features to appear during January. We’ll cover these in the February update, which we expect to release on February 3.

As always, we’d like subscribers to download and use the updated content. We update it to make sure that you have the latest information. It would be a pity to let that effort go to waste.

Office 365 for IT Pros Takes a Rest to Prepare for 2020

Like many companies, the Office 365 for IT Pros team is taking some time off during the holiday period. We won’t be publishing any more articles on this site until the new year comes around. Microsoft has put Office 365 on its annual lockdown and we don’t expect any changes to appear in production until Microsoft comes back to work in January.

This doesn’t mean that we won’t be busy. We’re preparing a new monthly update for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook that we plan to issue on January 6. Thirteen of the 24 chapters in the book have already been updated and we still have some work to do to on other chapters.

Thanks to our subscribers for your support. Without the revenue we raise from your subscriptions, the writing team could not afford to spend the time we do to investigate, probe, and understand the changes Microsoft makes in the Office 365 suite. If you haven’t updated your book files recently, please follow the advice in our FAQ to download the most recent content.

Happy Holidays to All and Let’s Look Forward to a Great 2020!

The Office 365 for IT Pros writing team.

Nineteen Content Chapters Updated

The Office 365 for IT Pros writing team is thrilled to announce that the October 2019 updates for the 2020 edition are now online. As the only book covering Office 365 that updates its content monthly, we’re always happy to see another month go by with the successful closing of an update. It’s become quite a habit for us.

Depending on the format they bought, subscribers can fetch the updated book files from Gumroad.com (PDF/EPUB) or Amazon (Kindle). See the Office 365 for IT Pros FAQ for more information about how to access the updated files.

In addition to updating nineteen of the twenty-four content chapters in the main book, we also updated the companion volume to fix a few bugs and move some content over from the main book. The current versions of both books now have a release date of 1 October 2019.

Many Changes

Given that the Microsoft Ignite conference is due in about five weeks, you might imagine that Microsoft would be operating at a slower tempo when it comes to pushing out changes to Office 365 tenants. That didn’t seem to be the case in September, where some big changes (like the support for sensitivity labels in the Office ProPlus for Windows apps) came along with tons of smaller changes. The upshot is that we did a lot of work to refine, improve, and update content (see Figure 1). Our full change log is available online.

We expect further changes to come along during October, including some big new features that might slip out before they receive some big publicity at the Microsoft Ignite conference. We plan to release the November update just before we all get on airplanes to head to Orlando. Let’s hope that the writing team has everything covered so that we can relax when we get there!

Second Update Includes Changes to 17 Chapters

The Office 365 for IT Pros writing team is proud to announce that the September update for Office 365 for IT Pros (2020 Edition) is now available from Gumroad.com (PDF and EPUB editions) and Amazon.com (Kindle edition). Subscribers can download the updates at their leisure. For details about how to download updates, please see our FAQ.

This update was broad and deep and covered 17 of the 24 content chapters. In addition, we’ve rewritten some sections and made minor updates across the book. The full set of changes are shown in Figure 1 and in our change log.

Clouds Keep Changing

Some of the changes within Office 365 in August 2019 underlined the value of the ePublishing model for books covering cloud technology. The Outlook Places service is in use by OWA, Outlook Mobile includes dark mode and support for shared mailboxes, Teams is served from South Korea datacenters, tenant do-it-yourself migration from Office 365 Video to Stream is available, and a new PowerShell module is available for AADRM configuration.

Viewed in isolation, each are small but important changes. Taken together with all the other changes that we learned about during August, you begin to realize just why printed books can’t cope with Office 365. Using ePublishing techniques allows us to issue a completely fresh updated book every month and is one reason why Office 365 for IT Pros is such terrific value for our subscribers. We hope that you agree.

The Office 365 for IT Pros (2020 Edition) includes 1,166 pages of useful information. Best of all, the information is updated on an ongoing basis. How many other books can make that claim?

Last Update Before the 2020 Edition

The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook writing team is proud to announce the availability of the 15th update issued for the 2019 edition. The updated files are dated June 11, 2019 and can be downloaded from Gumroad.com (EPUB/PDF versions) and Amazon (Kindle). The changes in this update are largely due to the end to end technical edit we do annually to prepare for the release of a new edition. You can see details in our change log. Details about how to download updated files are described in our FAQ.

So Many Changes in Just One Year

In total, we made 164 significant changes to the 24 chapters since the release of the 2019 edition last July. The chapters that received most updates were those dealing with SharePoint Online, Teams, and Azure Information Protection, all evidence of a great deal of change in those areas over the year. Apart from the significant changes, the book was under constant development to correct smaller errors such as changes in hyperlinks (the bane of our lives), updates in screen layouts, improve code in some of the 1,100+ PowerShell examples, and so on. Just about every one of the 1,170 pages were updated in some shape or form and we added some 50,000 words of extra content over the year. Office 365 certainly kept us busy!

The sheer number of changes is evidence of why the traditional printed book model doesn’t cope well with fast-changing cloud technologies like the Office 365 ecosystem. We’re very happy with the decision we took in 2014 to go with ePublishing and we think that our model of monthly updates works well.

Office 365 for IT Pros (2020 Edition) on July 1

This update is the last we will release before the publication of the 2020 edition, anticipated on July 1. At that time, we will extend a low-cost offer to subscribers to extend their subscription to cover the 2020 edition. Thanks to our sponsors Quadrotech, people who buy full-price copies of the 2019 edition in May and June will receive free upgrades to the 2020 edition. We will send email with codes to upgrade to eligible recipients on July 1.

Our plan for the 2020 edition will follow the model of the 2019 edition. We plan to release monthly updates to track changes inside Office 365 and already have a growing list of new features we know are due to arrive in different apps over the next few months. Our summer will pass quickly in a haze of writing.

Buy Office 365 for IT Pros today and receive a free update to the 2020 edition after it’s released in July 2019. No other publisher gives this kind of offer to subscribers, but then again, we are just a tad different…

New Edition of Office 365 for IT Pros in July

We issue a new edition of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook annually. Each new edition gives us the chance to evaluate the book and what whatever changes are appropriate to match the development of Office 365 (and to some degree, Microsoft 365). We might combine chapters, add new chapters, or move content to the companion volume. It’s all part of evolving a living book.

Right now, we’re working on the 2020 edition. If all goes well, authors get their text updated in time and the technical edit process goes smoothly, we should be able to launch the 2020 edition on July 1. At that point, we will retire the 2019 edition. The 2019 edition will receive one more round of updates, probably around June 15.

Author Changes

The 2020 edition is strengthened by the addition of Brian Desmond to the writing team. Brian is a very experienced MVP and the author of the very popular book “Active Directory: Designing, Deploying, and Running Active Directory” (O’Reilly). Brian is now responsible for our coverage of identities and authentication (Chapter 3) and is busy revising and expanding that content. Jussi Roine steps down from the writing team in this edition and the chapter he wrote (Flow) is now maintained by Gustavo Velez.

Why Buy Office 365 for IT Pros Now?

Potential buyers might ask if they should wait until July 1 to subscribe to the 2020 edition. We think that Office 365 for IT Pros delivers the best available coverage of Office 365, even if it was never updated. Under the print publishing model (or indeed, for most other eBooks), you never receive any updates. What you buy is what you read.

Our aim for Office 365 for IT Pros is to update content continuously to match the changes that occur inside the service. A glance at our change log tells you how many changes happen in a year. We think we do a good job of documenting the changes Microsoft make and integrating new and updated material into our monthly updates.

Quadrotech Sponsors Upgrade Fees

However, we also know that people don’t like signing up for something when a new version is on the way. To make things easier, Quadrotech, the main sponsor for Office 365 for IT Pros, has agreed to pay the upgrade fee for everyone who buys a full-price copy of the 2019 edition since May 1, 2019. We will send these subscribers a code for a free upgrade to the 2020 edition when the new edition is available. Other subscribers will receive the opportunity to upgrade to the 2020 edition for $14.95, just like we’ve done for previous updates.

Regretfully, we cannot offer upgrades to people who buy the Kindle version from Amazon. There is no facility to do this for Kindle books and Amazon doesn’t tell us anything about the people who buy the Kindle version. This is one of the reasons why we recommend that people buy the EPUB/PDF version and convert the EPUB version to MOBI if they want to read the book on a Kindle.

We thank our subscribers for the ongoing support you give to this project. Without your help, we could not afford to spend the time we do to track what happens inside Office 365 and documenting what we discover in our own unique style.

Fifteen of Twenty-Four Chapters Updated in May

The Office 365 for IT Pros writing team is proud to announce that the fourteenth update for the 2019 edition is now available to subscribers. The updated files are dated May 15, 2019 (see the inside front cover for version data). The companion volume has not been updated.

What’s in Update #14

Update #14 includes changes to 15 of the 24 chapters. Included in the changes are a the V1.0 of the PowerShell module for Teams (14), the GA of the unified labeling client for Azure Information Protection (24), multiple small but important changes in Teams (13), new properties for Get-MailboxStatistics (6), updated SLA and financial results for Office 365 (2 and 1), and the Files Restore feature for SharePoint Online (8). Apart from these specific changes, the update includes many other small changes (including the update of Azure Active Directory to support 256-character passwords) from our work to track developments in and around Office 365 or to incorporate new elements of best practice. The number of changes, some large, some small, underlines once again that ePublishing is the only practical way to cope with technical information about Office 365. How many other technical (or otherwise) covering Office 365 have offered their readers 14 updates?

The full set of changes is described in our change log. In addition to updated text about new features and information, we have completed periodic technical reviews of several chapters. The web never remains static, so hunting down and fixing hyperlinks is a never-ending task.

We have asked Amazon to send notifications to purchasers of the Kindle version that updates are available. Our FAQ has for more information about how to download updates.

Getting Updates

Subscribers to the PDF/EPUB version should log into their Gumroad library  to download the updated files. The updated files are completely new books with the new content integrated into existing text. You don’t have to cut and paste change information into an existing book. If you can’t remember details about your Gumroad account, find the original receipt from when you bought the book and use the View product link found there.

Next Steps – On to the 2020 Edition

All good things come to an end. After 14 updates, the 2019 edition of Office 365 for IT Pros is now in its final phase and the writing team has moved to the work necessary to prepare the 2020 edition, which we expect to publish in July 2019. We will continue to monitor the content of the 2019 edition and might issue a further update if we need to fix any problems found in its content.

When the 2020 edition is available, we will offer current subscribers a large discount to renew their subscription for a further year. This offer can only apply to the EPUB/PDF version as we have no control over the terms and conditions for Amazon Kindle sales and cannot offer discounts on that platform.

We thank our subscribers and sponsors for their continued support. Without it, we could not dedicate the required time to working on content and making sure that Office 365 for IT Pros is as up to date as possible.

Office 365 for IT Pros (2019 Edition) Update 13

The Office 365 for IT Pros writing team is proud to announce that the thirteenth update for the 2019 edition is now available to subscribers. The updated files are dated April 15, 2019 (see the inside front cover for version data). The companion volume has not been updated.

What’s in Update 13

Update #13 includes changes to 14 of the 24 chapters (plus an update for the sponsor chapter), so it’s a reasonably big release. Included in the changes are new data loss prevention policies for Teams (22), integrating Microsoft Search for Bing into Office 365 (9), the General Availability of Live Events (16), and hard deletes for compliance searches. Apart from these specific changes, the update includes many other small changes from our work to track developments inside Office 365 (like environments for Flow) or incorporate new elements of best practice. The number of changes, some large, some small, underlines once again that ePublishing is the only practical way to cope with technical information about Office 365. How many other technical (or otherwise) covering Office 365 have offered their readers 13 updates?

The full set of changes is described in our change log. In addition to updated text about new features and information, we have completed periodic technical reviews of several chapters. The web never remains static, so hunting down and fixing hyperlinks is a never-ending task.

How to Get the Updated Files for Office 365 for IT Pros

Subscribers to the PDF/EPUB version should log into their Gumroad library to download the updated files. The updated files are completely new books with the new content integrated into existing text. You don’t have to cut and paste change information into an existing book. If you can’t remember details about your Gumroad account, find the original receipt from when you bought the book and use the View product link in it.

We have asked Amazon to send notifications to purchasers of the Kindle version that updates are available. See our FAQ for more information about how to download updates.

On to May

The Office 365 for IT Pros team would love to hear from you. We welcome tips about new features, ideas for what you’d like to see covered in the book, and information about any issues you find. Please use the contact form on this site to connect. And now we start working on the May 2019 updates. Nothing about Office 365 ever stays static for long.

Office 365 for IT Pros 2019 Edition Update 12

The Office 365 for IT Pros writing team is proud to announce that the twelfth update for the only book that continually evolves to track developments in Microsoft’s cloud office system is now available to subscribers. The updated files are dated March 15, 2019 (see the inside front cover for version data).

Update #12 includes changes to 12 of the 24 chapters, so it’s a reasonably big release. Included in the changes are new supervision policies covering Teams (21), a new format for quarantined email (17), and a new workflow for team creation (13). Apart from that, there’s a mass of small changes as we track things happening inside Office 365 (like new information protection licenses) or incorporate new elements of best practice. The number of changes, some large, some small, underlines once again that ePublishing is the only practical way to cope with technical information about Office 365.

Updated Chapters

The full set of changes is described in our change log. In addition to updated text about new features and information, we have completed reviews of several chapters and fixed small but irritating problems like outdated hyperlinks. The web never remains static, so hunting down and fixing hyperlinks is a never-ending task.

How to Download the Office 365 for IT Pros Update

Subscribers to the PDF/EPUB version should log into their Gumroad library to download the updated files. The updated files are completely new books with the new content integrated into existing text. You don’t have to cut and paste change information into an existing book. If you can’t remember your Gumroad account, find the original receipt from when you bought the book and use the View product link in it.

We will ask Amazon to send notifications to purchasers of the Kindle version that updates are available. See our FAQ for more information about how to download updates.

On to the April Update

The Office 365 for IT Pros team would love to hear from you. We welcome tips about new features, ideas for what you’d like to see covered in the book, and information about any issues you find. Please use the contact form on this site to connect. And now we start working on the April 2019 updates. Nothing about Office 365 ever stays static for long.

One of the cool features we have in SharePoint Online (SPO) when working with news in modern SPO sites is the ability to create and distribute a news digest after publishing five or more news items in a site (or in the sites associated with a hub site). To access the News digest feature, click the See all link in the News web part placed in a modern page in a SPO site:

Once we click that link, a SPO application page with the list of all the news published is shown. In this page we will see in the actions bar a “Email a news digest” action:

When we click that action, we will be able to select the news we want to include in the digest. To go ahead with the digest definition, click Next:

Next we can do is just to configure the Digest in regards of the people we want to send it and also a short explanation about the digest. To send the digest, click on “Send news digest”:

All the recipients of the news digest will receive an e-mail with the following look & feel:

Additionally, the news digest we have just created is stored as SPO page in the Site Pages library so we can view it anytime we want:

Office 365 for IT Pros Update #11

The Office 365 for IT Pros writing team is proud to announce that the eleventh update for the only book that continually evolves to track developments in Microsoft’s cloud office system is now available to subscribers. The updated files are dated February 18, 2019 (see the inside front cover for version data).

This update spans 16 of the 24 chapters, so it’s a reasonably big release. The number of changes, some large, some small, underlines that ePublishing is the only practical way to cope with technical information about Office 365.

The full set of changes is described in our change log. In addition to updated text about new features and information, we have completed reviews of several chapters and fixed small but irritating problems like outdated hyperlinks. The web never remains static, so hunting down and fixing hyperlinks is a never-ending tasks

How Subscribers Get Updated Files

Subscribers to the PDF/EPUB version should log into their Gumroad library to download the updated files. The updated files are complete new books with the new content integrated into existing text. You don’t have to cut and paste change information into an existing book.

We will prompt Amazon to send notifications to purchasers of the Kindle version that updates are available. See our FAQ for more information about how to download updates.

The Office 365 for IT Pros team would love to hear from you. We welcome tips about new features, ideas for what what you’d like to see covered in the book, and information about any issues you find. Please use the content form on this site to connect. And now we start working on the March 2019 updates. Nothing ever stays static for long.

Updated Files Office 365 for IT Pros Now Available

The Office 365 for IT Pros writing team is thrilled to release the 10th update for the 2019 edition. Dated January 21, 2019, the updated files are now online and available on Gumroad.com (for subscribers who bought the EPUB and PDF versions) and Amazon (for those who bought the Kindle version from Amazon). Please see our FAQ for details about how to download the updated files.

Changes in Office 365 for IT Pros January 2019 Update

As always, details of the 16 chapter changes made in the January 2019 update are available in the Office 365 for IT Pros change log. We continue to process changes as we track developments inside Office 365 and expect that the same level of chapter changes will appear in future updates. The volume and type of changes made to a complex cloud application suite like Office 365 underline the value of the ePublishing model, especially when the updates are fully integrated into the body of the text. You don’t have to cut and paste anything to see fully up-to-date content.

Please Download Updates

Four years into this ePublishing journey, we’re still a little baffled when subscribers don’t download updates. Roughly 40% of our subscribers download new files in the month after updates are made available. Perhaps our update notifications are considered spam and never appear in inboxes, or perhaps everyone is so busy trying to keep up that they never get around to downloading the updates.

In any case, we encourage subscribers to download updates as soon as possible so that you have the latest information available to you.

Office 365 for IT Pros Kindle Edition

We publish Office 365 for IT Pros in EPUB, PDF, and Kindle format. The EPUB/PDF version is available from Gumroad.com while Amazon is the only distributor for Kindle. We prefer if people buy the EPUB/PDF version because we can communicate with you and advise when updates are available, but many people really like the Kindle version (in passing, I note some reports of good results in converting the EPUB version to Kindle format using the freeware Caliber e-Publishing software).

We do update the Kindle book when we update the EPUB/PDF version. We then ask Amazon to tell buyers know that updated files are available. However, Amazon is very reluctant to ask Kindle buyers to download new files. Their model is built around novels and other books that don’t change often, so when you load an updated Kindle book, you lose bookmarks. We can’t do much about this because that’s how Kindle works. In any case, sometimes we persuade Amazon to tell people that updates exist, and sometimes we don’t.

Reviews Drive Buying Behavior

If you look at Amazon today, you’ll see the 2019 edition, the older 4th edition, and the companion volume (bundled with the main book for EPUB/PDF purchases). You’ll also notice that the older book is priced $50 higher than the newer. We did this to dissuade people from buying the old book while keeping it online to allow those who bought it in the past to download updates. We even tell people in the blurb for the old book that they should buy the new.

The really interesting thing is that we continue to see people buying the old book. And the only reason we can see why this happens is that the old book has 29 customer reviews while the current book has none! We have no idea who these buyers are because Amazon controls the customer relationship and never tells authors who buys books, so we can’t contact the buyers to arrange a refund and get them the latest book.

The power of reviews obviously drives buying behavior and overcomes the warning in the book blurb and the much higher price. It’s a really interesting example of how people react to positive confirmation of value from peers in the Amazon reviews.

We’re going to solve the problem by taking the older book offline in a month or so. If you have the older book on Kindle, please refresh your library to make sure that you have the latest content (here’s a good article to explain how to fetch updates). And if you have the 2019 version on Kindle, perhaps you could write a review to help guide potential buyers away from buying an old version that is now very outdated.

The writing team is delighted to announce that the December update for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook (2019 Edition) is now available on Gumroad.com (PDF and EPUB) and Amazon.com (Kindle). This is the ninth update to be released.

Please follow the advice in our FAQ to download the updated files. Thirteen of the twenty-four chapters are updated with the updates to Chapter 19 being particularly extensive. As always, the change log is updated with information about the changes to the individual chapters and is repeated below for your convenience. The Companion Volume has also been updated in several chapters.

We urge subscribers to download and use the latest files. There’s no real point in subscribing to an eBook with monthly updates if you don’t use the facility to get the updates and learn from the new experience and insight that powers the changes we make to the book content. Remember, the way that the book is updated in-place and reproduced with all of the changes integrated with the rest of the content is unique and we’d like you to gain the benefit from your investment in your subscription.

Changes in the December 2019 Update

Eighth Update for the 2019 Edition

The author team is delighted to announce that the eighth update for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook (2019 edition) is now available for PDF/EPUB and Kindle. Subscribers can download the updated files using their Gumroad (PDF/EPUB) or Amazon (Kindle – should be online by 12 noon EST) accounts. See the FAQ for more information about how to download the updated files.

Please Download the Updates

We encourage subscribers to download and use the updated files. It’s a source of some bemusement to us that only 37.6% of our Gumroad subscribers downloaded the seventh update. There’s no point in reading outdated information, especially if you’re paying to receive updates.

Fourteen Chapter Updates

In line with our commitment to keep track of changes as they happen inside Office 365, this update includes refreshes for 14 of the 24 chapters in the main book. Several chapters in the companion volume are also updated. You can always access our change log online to track the evolution of the book and understand why we believe that an eBook is the only way to deal with fast-moving cloud topics. Here’s a list of the changes made in the eighth update:

Seventh Update for the 2019 Edition

The Office 365 for IT Pros writing team is delighted to announce that the seventh update for the 2019 edition is now available on Gumroad and Kindle. Subscribers who bought the PDF/EPUB version can download the updates from their Gumroad account while those who bought the Kindle version can download it from Amazon. See our FAQ for more details about how to fetch downloads. The FAQ also explains how we handle updates for the book.

A Major Update

The full set of changes made since the publication of the 2019 edition is available in our change log. Because of the amount of information released by Microsoft and other experts at the recent Ignite 2018 conference, the seventh update is very extensive and spans 16 of the 24 chapters (see below). In fact, this is the largest set of changes we have ever shipped in an update and the sheer number and scope of changes underlines the value of having an eBook for Office 365. No printed book simply could have coped with this kind of change.

In addition to the major changes we note in the change log, there are many other minor corrections and updates (like fixing typos). We planned to have a major refresh of Chapter 16 (on Teams and Meetings), but this text didn’t make the deadline. We will include it in the next update.

Please Update Your Files

Because so much content is updated in this release, we ask all our subscribers to download and use the new files. We can’t be blamed if you depend on something that you read in an older version! Like the cloud, we keep on changing…

We’ve also updated the companion volume (PDF/EPUB and Kindle). As a reminder, the companion volume is bundled with the PDF/EPUB version and is available separately for Kindle.

We hope that you enjoy the updates.

Wind-down in Orlando

The Office 365 for IT Pros team has scattered to the four winds and are now en route home to Ireland, the U.K., Finland, and Norway. Paul Robichaux flew his own plane home to Alabama yesterday after recording an episode of the Office 365 Exposed podcast, where we were joined by Greg Taylor, Director of Marketing for Exchange and Exchange Online. We recorded the show in one of the “pop-up” booths in the Community Central area of the Ignite hall, and the team who took care of us did a great job of generating audio and video feeds. Paul is processing the audio feed for iTunes and the video will be on Practical365.com soon. Stay tuned.

Before we recorded the podcast, Paul took some folks on a quick dawn tour over Orlando. It was great fun!

Ignite Overall

Ignite 2018 was a good conference. There were downsides, like flaky wi-fi connections in the exhibition hall and session rooms, and the food was so-so (IMHO), but really good content was shared with attendees. The problem some might have is to separate the content they can use today from announcements of directories and features that Microsoft will deliver at some point in the future. Ignite is a kind of launchpad for Microsoft to describe where they are going and what to expect over the coming year, and it’s important to always keep this fact in mind when listening to sessions.

Some complained at the technical level of sessions. I thought this was unfair. Sure, not every session was at 300 or 400 level, but there was more than enough good technical information available for people to justify their attendance. And anyway, the best thing about events like Ignite is the chance to meet people, reinvigorate connections, and learn from each other. You can always catch up on the sessions later, which is what I will be doing over the next few weeks.

Ignite Content

Microsoft is posting all the slides and recordings for all sessions online. You can find the sessions you want to view by searching the Microsoft Technical Community. For example, here’s the link to my talk about “Running a Tight Ship: Keeping Microsoft Teams Under Control.”

Slides and Shows

Looking at recordings online is great, but if you want to download slides and recordings for Ignite sessions so as to be able to view them offline, head over to the TechNet Gallery and grab a copy of Michel de Rooij’s download script. Be aware that you can consume lots of storage! And of course, you’ll want to run this command:

\Get-IgniteSession.ps1 -InfoOnly | Where {$_.Speakers -contains 'Tony Redmond'} | Select Title, location, startDateTime

… and then download the content!

Books, Books, Books

The Exchange product group was kind enough to buy 500 copies of Office 365 for IT Pros to giveaway at Ignite. Anyone who stayed right to the end of an Exchange session had a chance of getting a free book, and the offer seemed popular. All the free copies are gone now, but feel free to buy your very own copy here.

Ignite On Tour

Microsoft has announced they’ll be running 17 “Ignite on Tour” events around the world, starting in Berlin in December. There’s no news yet as to exactly what content will be presented at these events, but you can expect that many of the sessions will focus on delivering the latest news about Microsoft technologies.

On to 2019

As is the norm, Microsoft announced the date and location of the next Ignite conference at the end of this year’s event. No one was surprised to hear that we are going to be in Orlando again, but the news that the event is moving to later in the year was. November 4-8 seems like a better choice as Orlando should be less humid and hot. Pre-registration is now open for the 2019 event. It’s definitely an event worth considering.

If you can’t get to Ignite and don’t want to review all the Office 365 content shared at the event, why not invest less than $1/week (based on $49.95 for a subscription to a yearly edition) and buy a copy of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook? We do the work of sifting through Microsoft’s announcements, identifying what’s important, and documenting it in practical terms. That seems like a good thing. And $49.95 is a lot less expensive than the $5,000 cost of going to Ignite (conference fee, airfare, lodging, and other living expenses).

Clearing the Decks for Ignite

The writing team is happy to announce that we have released the September update for the Office 365 for IT Pros (2019 edition) eBook. This is update 6 for the 2019 edition.

We know that Microsoft has many announcements for Office 365 and Microsoft 365 technologies lined up for the Ignite 2018 conference next week, and we wanted to make sure that we got anything that needed to be updated into this release to be able to concentrate on what we hear about in Orlando. We expect to hear news about Exchange, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, Planner, Azure Active Directory, and all the other topics we cover in the book.

Fifteen chapters are updated in the September 20 release. Full details of all changes to the book are in the change log.

If you bought the PDF/EPUB version of the book from Gumroad, please download it from that site using the link in your receipt (see our FAQ for more information). If you bought the Kindle version from Amazon, please follow their guidelines to download the updated files.

Next Update in Late October

The next release is likely to be in late-October. It all depends on what we hear next week, when we have access to the updated software, whether we hit any problems with that software, and the time needed to write and update chapters. We’ll do our best to understand and test new features thoroughly before we commit anything to (electronic) paper.

Writing Never Stops

Summer might seem like a quiet time, but the Office 365 for IT Pros writing team has been busy over the last month documenting all the changes that have occurred within the service. The August 28 update for the 2019 edition is now available in PDF, EPUB, and Kindle formats.

This time round, we updated a total of 13 out of 24 chapters, so this is considered a large and important update for the book. See our change log for more details. It’s staggering to think that we have added a net 38 pages of content (about 16,500 words) since we launched the 2019 edition on 1 July. Only an eBook publishing model can keep pace with the volume and detail of change that happens inside a cloud service like Office 365.

Please download the updated files at your convenience. If you bought the book through Gumroad.com, you’ll find the link to get the updates in your receipt or in your account. If you bought the Kindle version, we have to convince Amazon to notify buyers about new content, We’ve done that now and hope that Amazon will send notifications soon. In the interim, you can follow the advice here to download the update.

Search in SharePoint Online (SPO) is an area that we will see change in the future. Indeed, you might have already seen some of the new search experiences in your modern SPO sites. In this article, I introduce you to some of the new search features trhat have almost arrived (any day now) in your SPO sites.

This article was published on Petri.com on August 17, 2018. For more information about SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, see Chapter 8 in Office 365 for IT Pros

Keeping Confidential Information Secret

Many SharePoint Online sites belonging to Microsoft 365 Groups and Teams hold confidential information that you might not want to share with guest members. When Microsoft first supported guest users for Office 365 Groups (now Microsoft 365 Groups) through Azure B2B Collaboration, the focus was on allowing guests to collaborate with tenant users through email and shared documents. Over time, apps like Teams and Planner included support for Azure B2B Collaboration and increased the amount of data available to guests. The issue often encountered now is how to keep organizational secrets when using collaborative applications.

Controlling Guest Access

In the early days of Office 365 Groups, there wasn’t much that group members could do to protect confidential information from guests. The Groups membership model is very simple. All members enjoy equal access to group content. This led to the creation of many additional groups to segregate information which needed to stay internal with that which could be shared externally.

As time went by, Microsoft introduced functionality to help. A range of options now exist:

• Groups and Teams blocked against guest access. By restricting membership to tenant users, you create conditions for unfettered internal discussions and sharing. The block is imposed by updating the properties of the group in Azure AD to prevent group owners adding guest members. An administrator can update the group properties manually or the group can inherit the block when a group owner or administrator assigns a sensitivity label with the appropriate restriction to the group.
• Inside a group with guest members, sensitivity labels with encryption can stop specific members (guests and perhaps some internal users) accessing sensitive documents in the group’s document library. Access rights defined in the label control who can interact with documents, and if guests aren’t assigned rights in a label, they cannot open any document assigned that label. This method is an effective block, but it does go against the general philosophy that members share equal access to group resources. Remember that document metadata is not encrypted by sensitivity labels, so guests will be able to see document titles and authors.
• Private channels avoid the need to create a new group by establishing barriers to sharing within teams. Private channels are restricted to a subset of team members, such as only tenant users. Anything shared in a private channel is only available to the members of the channel, including documents stored in the SharePoint Online team site for the channel.
• Shared channels don’t use Azure B2B collaboration, so don’t use guest members to control external access. Instead, tenants agree to federate using Azure AD cross-tenant access settings to allow users to work together in shared channels, including access to the SharePoint Online team sites used by the channels (just like private channels, each shared channel has its own site). Sensitivity labels placed on confidential documents can limit access to tenant members of shared channels.

With these options in mind, the best approach might be to stop external users getting into sensitive groups in the first place. As noted above, this is possible by blocking the ability of owners to add guests to their groups and teams at a group level or (for shared channels) with cross-tenant access settings. Administrators can always add guest members to teams and groups if necessary.

Controlling Group Policy Settings

The Azure Active Directory policy for Groups holds settings for how Microsoft 365 Groups behave in a tenant. One of those settings is AllowToAddGuests, which is True if the tenant allows guests to be members of groups, and False if you want to block guests. This policy covers all groups and is managed through PowerShell. If the tenant policy allows guests users, the properties of individual groups can be amended to block access to those groups.

Use Sensitivity Labels

Today, sensitivity labels are the best method to controlling external access to confidential information. A sensitivity label can hold several container management settings, including guest access and the external sharing capability for SharePoint. Applying the label to a group forces the inheritance of the container settings, and if the settings dictate a block for guest access, the group’s AllowAddGuests property is set to #False. Sensitivity labels are available in the Office 365 E3 and E5 plans.

Using Classifications to Block Guest Access

If you choose not to use sensitivity labels, you can use group classifications to mark confidential groups and update the properties of those groups to block guest access. A classification is a text value defined in the ClassificationList setting of the Groups policy. Classifications are visual markers intended to convey to users what kind of information a group holds. They do not affect how a group or team works, nor does a classification protect content or place any restriction on how that content is used. Adding or updating a new classification or removing a classification from the list does not affect classifications placed on existing groups.

Let’s assume that you define a “Secret” classification to mark confidential groups (or teams). After classifying the secret groups (using PowerShell or client UIs), we can use PowerShell to scan for and block guest access for those groups.

The first step in the example code creates a set of groups classified as “Secret.” The code then loops through each group to discover whether group-specific policy settings are in place. If so, the code updates the settings to block guest access. Groups that don’t have a policy setting are controlled by the tenant policy, so the first step is to create policy settings for the group. We can then update the setting to block guest access.

$GroupTemplate = (Get-AzureADDirectorySettingTemplate | ? {$_.DisplayName -eq "Group.Unified.Guest"})
$Groups = (Get-UnifiedGroup -ResultSize Unlimited | Where {$_.Classification -eq "Secret"})
 
ForEach ($Group in $Groups) {
    $GroupSettings = Get-AzureADObjectSetting -TargetType Groups -TargetObjectId $Group.ExternalDirectoryObjectId 
    if($GroupSettings) {
       # Policy settings already exist for the group - so update them
       $GroupSettings["AllowToAddGuests"] = $False
       Set-AzureADObjectSetting -Id $GroupSettings.Id -DirectorySetting $GroupSettings -TargetObjectId $Group.ExternalDirectoryObjectId -TargetType Groups
       Write-Host "External Guest accounts prohibited for" $Group.DisplayName 
    }
    Else
    {
       # Settings do not exist for the group - so create a new settings object and update
       $Settings = $GroupTemplate.CreateDirectorySetting()
       $Settings["AllowToAddGuests"] = $False
       New-AzureADObjectSetting -DirectorySetting $Settings -TargetObjectId $Group.ExternalDirectoryObjectId -TargetType Groups
       Write-Host "External Guest accounts blocked for"$Group.DisplayName 
    }
}

To check that the block for guest access is in place, we can create a list of the groups blocked from having guest members. To do this, run the Get-UnifiedGroup cmdlet to check the AllowAddGuests property, which is $False if the group is blocked. For example, this command reports the display names and classification for all blocked groups. Remember that the block works for all clients that populate group membership, including Teams.

Get-UnifiedGroup -ResultSize Unlimited | ? {$_.AllowAddGuests -eq $False } | Format-Table DisplayName, Classification

It’s critical to realize that applying a block on guests to a group does nothing to remove existing guests. If you want to eject existing guests, you need to do that separately.

Multiple Secret-Keeping Techniques

Multiple approaches are available to block guests from accessing content shared in Teams and Groups. The most fundamental is to block guest access completely, but if guests are already present, consider using Private channels in Teams or limit access to confidential documents with sensitivity labels and encryption.

Evolve, the UK’s premier one-day conference about Office 365 and associated topics is on Monday, September 10, 2018 at the National Conference Center in Birmingham. Entrance is free (get your ticket here). The Office 365 for IT Pros team is strongly represented – come along and enjoy these sessions. Heckling is gently invited, with the knowledge that we will heckle back.

You never know – we might even give away some books at the event.

Tony’s source material comes from Chapters 13 and 14, while Ståle’s is in Chapter 16. Paul’s comes from Chapter 13 and 14 too…

Search-Mailbox – Powerful but Limited

Note: Search-Mailbox is due for deprecation on July 1, 2020. See this post for more information.

Search-Mailbox is a very powerful cmdlet. It can search user mailboxes to find and remove content, or copy content to another mailbox, or both. The usual situation when Search-Mailbox is called into use is when someone, invariably an important person (in their minds, anyway), makes a mistake and sends email when they shouldn’t have and now wants every trace of the message eradicated. Search-Mailbox can do this, but only within the boundary of a single Office 365 tenant, and only in user and shared mailboxes.

Another common scenario is when some inappropriate or malicious content is circulating in email. If you can construct search criteria to find the bad content, Search-Mailbox can track it down and erase it, again from user and shared mailboxes.

No Group Mailboxes

Search-Mailbox can’t deal with group mailboxes, so it cannot erase content posted to the Inbox of Office 365 Groups nor can it remove Teams compliance records from the Team Chat folder. Removing compliance records might seem to be a bad thing, and normally it is, but if you do this to force Teams to synchronize the deletions back to its Azure data services and so remove the bad content from channel conversations, it could be a good thing. If, that is, appropriate authorizations are sought and granted to allow deletions to proceed.

The reason why Search-Mailbox is limited to user and shared mailboxes is that it was built many years ago to run inside an Exchange on-premises environment where the only objects it might have to process were user and shared mailboxes. Apart from making sure that it can understand queries expressed in KQL-syntax, Microsoft hasn’t done much to Search-Mailbox since Exchange 2010.

Dealing with Non-Mailbox Content

Search-Mailbox cannot process documents stored in SharePoint or OneDrive for Business libraries, or sways, plans, or forms, or any of the other non-Exchange content created by users and found inside Office 365.

If you need to run a search to find information across all the Office 365 workloads, you can use a content search, which covers Exchange (including public folders), SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams. Once you’ve found the information, you can add a purge action to the search and have it remove items. But here’s the downside – content searches can only purge 10 items at a time and can only soft-delete information. In other words, the deletions can be reversed.

Hard Deletes

Probably with good reason, Microsoft has not yet allowed content searches to hard-delete items from the workloads it supports. Perhaps this is because the same kind of backups that exist on-premises don’t exist in the cloud, and if you made a mistake and permanently removed some information, Microsoft wouldn’t be able to retrieve that information. When backups don’t exist, soft-deletion and a nice period in a recycle bin seems like a good idea.

But Search-Mailbox does hard-delete items, which is what you want to do with malware or other objectionable material in mailboxes, so it’s a powerful tool that needs to be handled with care.

For more information about Search-Mailbox, see Chapter 6 of Office 365 for IT Pros. For more information about content searches, see Chapter 20.

A recent post by MVP Mark Vale describes how to use synchronization transformation rules in AADConnect to change the last name, first name format (for example, Smith, James) for display names to a more user-friendly first name last name format (our example becomes James Smith) for accounts as they synchronize to Azure Active Directory from an on-premises Active Directory. The lastname, firstname format is very popular in large-scale on-premises deployments where more control can be exercised over the displayname format. You don’t have the same degree of control in Office 365.

The Default Office 365 DisplayName

The idea behind transforming displaynames is driven by the fact that Office 365 uses first name last name as its default way to refer to users, including to form the default alphabetical avatar that appears when a photo isn’t available for a user account. Or, as shown in Figure 1, when an Office 365 app gets it wrong (in this case, the Admin Center) and forgets how to find the user photo.

If the last name, first name format is used for displaynames, my avatar shows up as RT. You can now see the problem. I would always know myself as TR, but never as RT.

Other apps, like Outlook Web App (Figure 2) are better at finding the user photo. It’s always best inside Office 365 when you populate user accounts with photos. And if you have photos for tenant users, you should have photos for guests too.

@Mentions Are a Big Influence

In any case, the idea is that it’s nicer and more user-friendly for people if they can refer to their peers by their first name in the @mentions used in apps like Teams and email. Certainly, it does seem better to say something like “Perhaps @James Smith can help” instead of “Perhaps @Smith, James can help.” Or even, if you work in an organization that has a very large GAL and needs to differentiate people who share a common name, “Perhaps @Smith, James (Operations Dept x1514) can help.”

Thinking and Testing Required

Changing the displayname format is not something to do lightly. You might think that it’s a simple matter of throwing off the shackles of on-premises directory organization, but it could have consequences such as creating problems for user documentation or the help desk, or even confusing users as they try to find other people in the GAL after they move to Office 365.

Remember that a change made to Azure Active Directory (which is what you do if you change a synchronization rule) affects everywhere in Office 365 where a user displayname appears. You can’t have a situation where the GAL is ordered by the traditional last name and @mentions are auto-magically transformed into user-friendly first names. Some thinking, planning, and testing is needed before you take the plunge. This is especially so in situations where the organization includes large numbers of people who share last names. Consider how a change will affect people in different countries instead of assuming that everything will go well because the new format works for your name.

Easing the Way to the Cloud

Overall, if you can make the transition from the old displayname format to the default used in Office 365, you’ll probably ease the transition from on-premises to Office 365. It’s something worth thinking about.

For more information about setting up and running AADConnect to link an on-premises Exchange organization with Azure Active Directory, see Chapter 3 in Office 365 for IT Pros.

An Idea for a Cloud Exchange Book Grows

The story began in August 2014, when Tony Redmond started to write about Office 365 while on vacation in the South of France. Microsoft Press had published my Exchange 2013 book in September 2013, and I wanted a new book project, perhaps covering the brand-new world of cloud Exchange. However, the problem with Office 365 was that everything changed all the time (it still does, as Paul Cunningham describes here).

In any case, the range of topics that needed coverage and the ever-changing nature of Office 365 meant that more authors were needed, so I signed up Michael Van Horenbeeck and Paul Cunningham, with Jeff Guillet as the Technical Editor, and we launched into the new project in December 2014.

Ignite 2015

By April 2015, we had a book and approached Microsoft to ask whether they’d like to launch it at their new Ignite conference in Chicago the following month. Microsoft agreed, and also agreed to publish some paper copies of the book. That was quite a project because a professional editor had to transfer our Word documents into Adobe Indesign to create the PostScript files for a printer. But it all worked and 500 copies of “Office 365 for Exchange Professionals” appeared at Ignite 2015. Perry Clarke of Microsoft, the technical brain behind many of the innovations inside Office 365, is holding one of the printed copies in Figure 1.

The printed version was about 550 pages. We have dabbled at printing other editions, but once the book got to around 900 pages, the exercise proved just too difficult. In any case, a printed book goes out of date as soon as the ink hits the paper, and the whole point of doing an eBook is to avoid that problem. This is especially pertinent when you’re writing about something like Office 365 when topics change every month.

The Desire to Update

We always knew that we needed to update the book but had not figured out how best to do it in quite the best way. The IT/DEV Connections conference in Las Vegas in September 2015 seemed like a good target, so we launched the second edition there with the help of Binary Tree, who paid for a nice party, and gave away copies of the book on USB sticks signed by the writing team (Figure 2).

Third Edition

Our third edition appeared at Ignite 2016. By now, we had sorted the update process and were able to ship updates as we needed. But Office 365 was changing and the initial focus on moving email to the cloud had passed. People wanted to do more with Office 365 than email and we needed to change the focus and content of the book.

Fourth Edition

This brought us to the fourth edition, released on June 1, 2017. We renamed the book to be “Office 365 for IT Pros” to reflect the new focus on the breadth and depth of the service and included coverage of many new topics. We welcomed a new technical editor in Vasil Michev too, and began to enjoy the unique experience of his probing questions about arcane but important details that we had never considered before.

The 4th edition lasted 13 months and received 51 updates in that time. Some 315 separate chapter updates were applied. It was a crazy release schedule, but it was needed because of kind of changes that happened inside Office 365 during this period. Teams appeared in November 2016 and reached General Availability in March 2017. We also had to deal with Planner, Stream, StaffHub (now gone), big changes in Azure Information Protection, and so on. In any case, the fast cadence of change forced a pace that we kept up with, but it was hard work at times.

Fifth (2019) Edition

The fifth edition was launched with a new writing team. Reflecting that Office 365 is much more than email, we added people with real expertise in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business, app development, and security. Paul Cunningham and Michael Van Horenbeeck stepped down after four versions but their legacy remains in some of the content, especially in the new companion volume. This version featured the photo of a land iguana on the front cover.

Sixth (2020) Edition

Our sixth edition launched in July 2019 and a Galapagos giant tortoise replaced the land iguana on the front cover. The influence of Teams on the Office 365 ecosystem was now very apparent, and we gave an increasing amount of coverage to the topic over three chapters. We also launched a new chapter covering the Power Platform. We don’t intend to do much more on app development because that’s a book onto its own right, but it’s good to have this content.

Seventh (2021) Edition

In July 2020 we launched the seventh edition. Brian Desmond, a well-known author, took over the mail flow chapter from Brian Reid and we welcomed a new sponsor in Quest Software. Office 365 still exists, but Microsoft is slowly but surely moving everything to the Microsoft 365 brand. Lots of activity continues around Teams, SharePoint Online, sensitivity labels, compliance, and many other topics. We still pump out monthly updates and the interesting thing is that each update appears to change more chapters. This might be because Microsoft is changing apps more often, or it’s because we are better at detecting change through the revamped message center in the Microsoft 365 admin center (and its integration with Planner). The cover of this version features some steaming clouds of sulphur on the side of a mountain in Iceland. The lone figure in the distance is a metaphor for a lonely Office 365 tenant administrator grappling with the challenges of cloud life. At least, that’s our story…

So that’s the background story of how Office 365 for IT Pros came to exist.

Making Teams Client Behave

Most of the time, the Teams clients run along without a problem. But like all software, they have their moments. Here’s how to attack the problem if your Teams clients start to misbehave, including how to give the Microsoft developers some feedback.

This article was posted on Petri.com on August 9, 2018

For more information about Teams, see Chapter 13 in the main book. And if you want to learn about how to use PowerShell with Teams, it’s in Chapter 14. All the information about using Teams with Meetings is in Chapter 16!

Removing Users from Office 365

Microsoft issued a new wizard to delete Office 365 accounts last week. It has the normal quota of cute graphics and some glitches to boot, but the wizard gets the job done in terms of converting a user mailbox into a shared mailbox and reassigning access to their OneDrive for Business account.

This article was published on Petri.com August 7, 2018.

For more information about how to delete users from Office 365, see Chapter 6 in the main book.

Meet the Office 365 for IT Pros Writing Team in Orlando

Many of the authors who contribute to Office 365 for IT Pros will be at the Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando (September 24-28). Ståle Hansen, Brian Reid, Jussi Roine, and Tony Redmond are all scheduled to speak. The full schedule is being gradually developed by Microsoft as they slot sessions and presenters into time slots and rooms. We will update our information here as we receive it from the Ignite organizers.

Office 365 for IT Pros Sessions at Microsoft Ignite 2018

A session Id of THRxxxx means that it’s a 20-minute theater session presented on one of the stages erected around the technology exhibition. The BRK sessions are either 45-minute or 75-minute sessions. You can get previous episodes of the Office 365 Exposed podcast on  iTunes. All are welcome to come along and heckle at the podcast.

The full Ignite session catalog is available online. Like all Ignite conferences, it’s likely that the details of sessions will change as the conference approaches to move times around, introduce new sessions, or even drop some sessions.

Publishing an eBook

Some have asked about how we actually produce the eBook. It’s actually a pretty simple process.

Authors Take Charge

Authors are in charge of their chapters. They make changes as they see fit based on what’s happening inside Office 365, their experiences, and insights from other professionals like Microsoft contacts, MVPs, or customers. All chapters are in separate Word documents and changes are tracked.

When an author is finished updating their chapter, depending on the type of change it might go through a technical editing process to check that the content is correct. It’s amazing how easily errors sneak in…

All changes go through a copy edit to ensure that the content reads well and fits with the rest of the book. We also check the positioning of figures and whether they have alt-text in place. Afterwards the author gets to check any changes made by the copy editor (usually Tony Redmond in his role as the overall editor of the book) and the final text is settled upon.

When the time comes to generate a book, all the changes from individual Word documents are brought into a single large (37 MB) book file, which is also a Word document. We generate a completely new book for each release to make sure that people don’t have to patch pages or do anything so tiresome. When you download an update, you get a complete, up-to-date book with all the updates made by authors incorporated into the content you see.

We generate the PDF version of the book direct from Word (save as PDF), but we need to use a different tool to create the EPUB and MOBI (Kindle) versions.

That tool is Calibre. We’ve tweaked the Word template over the years so that we are sure that Calibre will generate good-looking EPUB and MOBI output. This is an ongoing process…

EPUB and PDF Updates

We then upload the PDF and EPUB files to Gumroad.com and save them as updates for the book. Gumroad can send email on our behalf to inform subscribers that an update is available and it’s then up to the individuals to decide whether they want to download the new files. With the 2019 edition, we are trying not to update as often as we did with the last edition (51 times) because people have told us that they can’t cope with such a frequent schedule. We would like to use a monthly update frequency, but that really depends on the degree of technical change that happens within Office 365.

Kindle Updates

The update process is different for Kindle. We upload the MOBI file to Amazon and the file then goes through the Kindle generation and publication process, which can take up to eight hours to complete. Eventually, the book update appears on Amazon sites around the world. We always include the date of the last update in the book description to let readers know how recent the content is.

Amazon doesn’t allow us to proactively update purchasers that new content is available. We go through a process of justifying a notification by proving to Amazon that it would be valuable for people to know that they should refresh the book in their Kindle library. Basically, Amazon’s processes are built for novels that seldom if ever change and not for technical 1,000-page books that might change weekly. It can be a battle to convince the Kindle team that our changes are important, but we do try.