Eleventh Edition of the Most Comprehensive Book About Office 365 and the Microsoft 365 Ecosystem

After some late nights finishing up the book content before building the PDF and EPUB files, the Office 365 for IT Pros team is happy to announce the publication of Office 365 for IT Pros 2025 edition. This is the eleventh book in a series going back to May 2015 and is the 109th monthly update issued in that time. The new book is now online on Gumroad.com.

We have emailed an upgrade code to subscribers of the 2024 Edition to allow them to upgrade for $16.95 (the same price as last year). We also sent a code to people who subscribed during June 2024 to allow them to claim a free upgrade. This is in line with our normal policy of offering anyone who subscribes in the last month of an edition the chance to automatically extend their subscription to cover the next edition.

A New PowerShell Book

Office 365 for IT Pros (2025 Edition) does not have a companion volume. We made the decision to discontinue the companion volume because the information it contains is now quite old. Please keep the 2024 companion volume if you wish to retain access to its content.

This year, we launched a new 240-page four chapter book called Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell. We have strong PowerShell content in the 2024 edition. Given all the changes in Microsoft 365 PowerShell modules and growing usage of Microsoft Graph APIs, it seemed like a good idea to create a book focusing on this area. There are still hundreds of PowerShell examples in the main book where they are used to explain how to accomplish specific tasks. The PowerShell book allows us to dedicate more in-depth coverage to this critical area, especially about using PowerShell with Microsoft Graph APIs and the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK.

The Office 365 for IT Pros (2025 edition) subscription includes Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell in both PDF and EPUB formats. Like our other content, we will update the PowerShell eBook monthly.

In addition to including the new eBook in the Office 365 for IT Pros subscription, we sell Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell separately. People who don’t want to buy the full Office 365 for IT Pros subscription can purchase a copy of the PowerShell book from Gumroad.com or as a paperback version available from Amazon.com. This is the first time that we have produced a print book since the original edition of Office 365 for Exchange Professionals appeared at the Ignite conference in May 2015. At that time, Microsoft paid for 500 print copies, all of which were distributed at the conference. Anecdotal evidence since is that some of our readers have printed the PDF version to have a hard copy. The size of the main book (now about 1,220 pages) means that online print services can’t handle it, but splitting off a section to create a separate book allows opens up the possibility of print copies again.

In the future, we might split off other books, such as ones covering Teams or compliance, and make them available in the same way. That decision depends on how people like the PowerShell book.

Why New Editions Appear on July 1

Some ask why we choose to introduce new editions on July 1. We’ve done this since 2016 to align with Microsoft’s fiscal year. That might sound strange, but it’s an undeniable fact that many Microsoft engineering groups aim to ship new functionality before the close of their fiscal year. There’s a rush within Microsoft to finish new software and make it available to customers before June 30. Afterwards a relative lull sets in as many Microsoft engineers take vacation. In a strange kind of way, this helps us to frame a new edition in a way that wouldn’t be possible at the end of the calendar year.

CoreView is Our New Sponsor

After a terrific year’s support from CodeTwo Software, including some excellent t-shirts made by Szymon Szczesniak and his team, CoreView is the sponsor for Office 365 for IT Pros (2025 Edition). We like having an alignment with our sponsors and believe that this exists with CoreView, who are deeply involved with Microsoft 365 management and automation. We look forward to a great year working with the CoreView team.

Seven Books in One

We like to think that Office 365 for IT Pros is seven books in one:

• Exchange Online.
• Entra ID.
• SharePoint Online.
• Teams.
• Purview Compliance.
• Information Protection.
• Automation (Power Automate and PowerShell).

Office 365 for IT Pros (2025 Edition) strengthens our claim. The two books covered by the subscription contain a huge amount of knowledge. Our work isn’t perfect, but it’s our honest and best effort to communicate our experience of working with Exchange Online, Entra ID, SharePoint Online, Teams, OneDrive for Business, Planner, Stream, Purview, Power Automate, and associated technologies. The rate of change across these products means that the advantage of publishing an eBook is more evident now than ever before. In the 24 hours before publication, we updated five chapters of the Office 365 for IT Pros (2025 Edition) eBook and one chapter for the Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell eBook.

Stay tuned for our email announcing when the new book is released and available. Thank you for your support for the Office 365 for IT Pros project. We hope that you like the books as much as we enjoyed working on them. And stay tuned to what we publish here. You never know when we might say something valuable!

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!

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!

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.

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!

Fourth Update for the 2021 Edition

The fourth update for Office 365 for IT Pros (2021 edition) is now available. Subscribers who bought the EPUB/PDF version through Gumroad.com can download the updated files from their account or by using the link in their receipt. Those who bought the Kindle version from Amazon can ask Amazon to make the updated files available to them. See our FAQ for more information.

The November update includes changes to 22 of the 24 chapters. We also updated the companion volume. You can find full information about the chapter changes in our change log. Among notable changes are:

• New numbers for Office 365 usages (and Azure AD) plus updated SLA results (1).
• SharePoint spaces is now GA and Syntex is available (8).
• The Teams desktop client supports offline working. A new ARM64 client is available. Teams meeting recordings can be stored in OneDrive for Business (11).
• Teams admin center supports more granular permissions control over third-party and LOB apps. The location for Teams compliance records in user and group mailboxes has changed (12/13).
• Tasks in Teams is now GA (15).
• New UI for creating retention labels (19).
• Three new crucial audit events (21).
• Microsoft believes Office 365 DLP policies are now equivalent to Exchange DLP policies. New sensitive data types (22)/
• Double-key encryption is available for sensitivity labels. Scoping for sensitivity labels (for either information protection or container management or both) is available, so lots of screen shots updated (24).

In addition, there’s a bunch of small detail changes which are important but never get headlines. It’s just part of keeping the book updated and accurate to as high a level as we can.

We encourage our subscribers to download the latest files. There’s no point in paying for updates if you don’t use them! And if you haven’t yet subscribed to Office 365 for IT Pros, what information are you missing every month?

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!