Monthly Update #111 for Office 365 for IT Pros eBook

The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook team is delighted to announce that files are available for download for the September 2024 update of:

• Office 365 for IT Pros (2025 edition) in PDF and EPUB formats.
• Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell in PDF and EPUB formats.

Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell is available as part of the Office 365 for IT Pros bundle and as a separate product.

Subscribers can download the updates files using the link in the receipt emailed to them after their original purchase or from the library in their Gumroad.com account. We no longer make a Kindle version of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook available through Amazon. It proved too difficult to release updates to readers through the convoluted Amazon process. The Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell book is available through Amazon in Kindle and paperback versions. The paperback is our first attempt at delivering a printed book and the response has been interesting. I guess some folk still like to have text on paper as a reference.

See our change log for information about the changes in the September 2024 update and our FAQ for details about how to download updates.

Changes in the Ecosystem

To ensure that the book content is updated and remains current, we spend a lot of time tracking change within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Three issues that are causing people some concerns are:

• Microsoft plans to require accounts that connect to Azure administrative portals, like the Azure portal, Entra admin center, and Intune admin center or use the Azure PowerShell module and Cl, to use multifactor authentication. The requirement swings into force on October 15. In many respects, this is an excellent idea because the only accounts that access these sites are by definition administrators and all administrator accounts should be protected. But people assume that Microsoft will force all accounts to use MFA and that’s just not correct. More information is available here.
• This month Microsoft plans to update Exchange Online with a revised SMTP AUTH Clients submission report to help organizations understand if apps and devices are using SMTP AUTH with basic authentication to submit messages to Exchange. The plan is to remove basic authentication for SMTP AUTH in September 2025, and the signs are that some organizations will struggle with this deadline as they do not know how to upgrade hardware (devices like multifunction printers) or apps to support OAuth. Follow the discussion online and if you have concerns, voice them there. Ian McDonald from the Exchange development group is responding to queries as they arise.
• The new Outlook for Windows is generally available, and Microsoft is renaming the older Win32 version to be Outlook (classic). The rename process for the application is starting around now. Microsoft still plans to support Outlook classic until 2029 at the earliest so there’s no cause for immediate concern. The new Outlook is not ready to take over from Outlook classic yet and won’t be for several years. But it is the case that new functionality will increasingly be only available in the new Outlook (and likely OWA), and that’s something to take into consideration as Microsoft 365 tenants plan their client strategy for the coming years.

Other stuff is happening too – and all the time- but these are three of the big issues I hear discussed on an ongoing basis.

Discounted Subscriptions

We have traditionally allowed subscribers of prior editions to continue their subscriptions to cover new edition at discounted rates. The cheapest way to upgrade is always within three weeks of the release of a new edition. After that, we start to gradually reduce the discount. Our discount period finished today and there are no longer general discounts available for previous subscribers. Instead, we’re reaching out to people who have supported us over several editions to offer targeted discounts. We think this is a fairer approach to reward people who have helped us and to control the misuse of discount codes.

We know of about 70 cases where people who have never subscribed before having taken out subscriptions to the 2025 edition using codes that we made available to previous subscribers. Sometimes this happens because people pass their subscription to co-workers and sometimes it’s because people just like to share. In any case, our ability to offer discounted subscriptions is compromised when codes are misused, so we’re going to be a little more restrictive about how we issue discounts. I don’t think anyone’s doing anything particularly horrible here, but we’d like to take care of the folks who support us before anyone else gets the chance to use a discount.

On to Update #112

There’s no rest for the wicked and the Office 365 for IT Pros team is already working (or so they tell me) on update #112, which we anticipate releasing on October 1. No doubt lots will happen between this and then to add to the rich tapestry of life and the joys (!!!) of coping with constant change inside the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.

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?

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!

Monthly Update #108 Released to Subscribers

The team is happy to release the final update for the Office 365 for IT Pros 2024 edition. Monthly update #108 is the eleventh and last update for this edition as we will release the Office 365 for IT Pros 2025 Edition on July 1, if all our plans proceed as we hope.

Subscribers should download the latest files from their Gumroad.com account or use the link in the receipt they received after the original purchase. More information about obtaining updated files is available in our FAQ. We’ve updated the Kindle book files on Amazon.com too. Unfortunately, purchasers of the Kindle book must contain Amazon support to gain access to the updated files.

A Massive Source of Knowledge

The updated book contains a mixture of new information, changes, and deletions as we keep pace with the ongoing flood of changes for Microsoft 365 applications delivered by Microsoft. To give some idea about the effect on the book of tracking change, the July 2023 release spanned 1,352 pages (693,609 words). The current update spans 1,429 pages (733,864 words).

Since we released Office 365 for IT Pros 2024 edition, we’ve added 67 pages (net) with 40,255 words. Behind those raw statistics are a bunch of changes (which might not affect page or word count) and deletions (which create space for new material). A glance at our change log gives an insight into where the changes occurred. If anyone doubts the usefulness of a book that’s constantly updated to cater for ongoing change in a technology, they only need to look at our change log.

The New Version

A new version gives the writing team the chance to review the book end to end. We’re currently in the middle of a comprehensive technical edit process to improve material, identify outdated content that’s lingering and occupying space, address areas that need additional explanation, and even update screenshots to match current user interfaces. Microsoft developers appear to be fascinated by user interface tweaks. They change one or two words on a screen and don’t say anything, so we only find out about the need for a figure update if someone tells us or we notice the change.

The tasks listed above are the norm for us. The 2025 edition is the eleventh in a series going back to 2015. This time around, we plan to make some more fundamental changes.

No More Companion Volume after the 2024 Edition

First, we’re dropping the companion volume. This book was intended to be the place where we could move old content so that people who still needed the information could find it. However, the companion volume has become increasingly decrepit, and we doubt if many still use it. Another factor to consider is the improvement in Microsoft documentation over the years, meaning that those who need information about something like Microsoft Forms or Sway can find it online.

A New PowerShell Book

Second, as obvious from the numbers cited above, the main book is too big. We’ve thought about this a lot and concluded that the best way forward is to split off standalone books covering selected topics. At the end, we might end up with a group of six books under the Office 365 for IT Pros banner. For now, we will start with PowerShell and have created a standalone 200-page book called “Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell.” We plan to sell this book on its own as well as bundling it with Office 365 for IT Pros.

The main book still includes many PowerShell examples where they fit in context. However, the in-depth discussions about PowerShell, the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK, and using Graph API requests from PowerShell have a new home. The PowerShell book includes about 40% more content than the equivalent chapter in the 2024 edition.

It’s too early to say yet what the next standalone book will be. It could cover Groups and Teams, or maybe Compliance. We’re still noodling on that topic.

What is clear is that Office 365 for IT Pros subscribers will receive both the main book and any standalone books we create. You won’t lose access to any information. In fact, you’ll have even more information at your fingertips.

Subscribing to Office 365 for IT Pros 2025 Edition

We still have one more month to run before Office 365 for IT Pros 2025 Edition is available. We understand that people are unwilling to subscribe to a book that will soon be replaced. Our offer is that anyone who subscribes to Office 365 for IT Pros 2024 edition in June 2024 will receive a free upgrade to the 2025 edition when it is available.

As to our current subscribers, we thank you for your support. Without your backing we could not afford to spend the time we do to keep the book updated. After we publish the 2025 edition, you’ll be able to upgrade your subscription for a heavily discounted price. It’s our way of saying thank you.

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 #104 Available for Download

The Office 365 for IT Pros team is delighted to announce the availability of the February 2024 update (monthly update #104) for the Office 365 for IT Pros (2024 edition) eBook. We urge subscribers to download the updated files from your Gumroad.com account or by using the link to the files included in the receipt emailed to you upon purchase.

Details of the changes in update #104 are available in our change log. Please consult our FAQ for more information about how to download the updated files.

Busy January

A new year brings new developments and new challenges. Possibly the biggest update in January 2024 occurred when Microsoft removed the limitations on Copilot for Microsoft 365 purchases to allow tenants with Office 365 E3 and E5 licenses to consider Copilot deployments at a much lower cost. The Copilot Pro license also arrived to serve personal consumers.

It’s likely that the pace of Copilot trials will now accelerate as people try out the AI assistant to see if it makes sense in their environment. Our experience so far is that Copilot is great at some things (like summarizing Teams meetings) and less impressive in other areas (like text generation). A solid test using your own information will tell you if it makes sense to proceed with a mass roll-out of expensive licenses. We’ll support this activity by gradually increasing the amount of Copilot-related content in the book, especially information about managing Copilot.

Another big story during January was Microsoft’s admission that the Midnight Blizzard nation state attackers managed to penetrate their production Microsoft 365 tenant and exfiltrate email from some corporate email accounts, including members of its senior leadership. The route in was a password spray to compromise an account in a test tenant followed by use of a malicious OAuth app.

The episode proved once again that enabling MFA for all accounts should be the norm (and here’s a script to help you report MFA enablement and use). The app permissions report script we published afterward might help your tenant avoid a similar attack.

More positively, Microsoft announced that Office 365 now has more than 400 million paid seats when they revealed their FY24 Q2 results. Even after 13 years, Office 365 user numbers keep on growing at around 2.5 million seats monthly.

New and Deprecated Functionality

New functionality continues to flow and it’s important that tenants keep a close eye on the announcements Microsoft makes in the Microsoft 365 admin center message center. A flood of updates appeared during January, including the ability to share contact information during Teams chats. I think this feature will be popular. Unsurprisingly given the retirement of the classic Teams client at the end of March 2024, it’s noticeable that new Teams features tend to be available only for the new client.

Other old functionality that’s due for retirement soon include the Azure AD and Microsoft Online Services (MSOL) PowerShell modules. Apart from the cmdlets that deal with license management (already obsolete and non-functional), the other cmdlets in these modules will continue working after March 31, 2024, but Microsoft won’t provide support if customers experience problems using the cmdlets. If you haven’t done so already, it’s time to embrace the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK and convert scripts to use SDK cmdlets. Chapter 23 of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook is packed with examples of how to use the SDK cmdlets and we add more each month.

Microsoft’s latest attempt to retire the Search-Mailbox cmdlet seems to be more serious than before. I never mind seeing old technology retiring if it is replaced by better technology, but that’s not what’s happening here. The purported replacement (compliance search purge actions) might have some advantages in larger tenants as the number of mailboxes to remove items from scale up, but gaps still exist between what you can do with Search-Mailbox and what’s possible with compliance search actions.

Update #105 Starting Up

No sooner than we finish one update than we start on the next. February 2024 is a 29-day month, so we’ve an extra day of updates to process. What fun! Stay tuned for update #105 coming on March 1, 2024.

Monthly Update #103 Now Available for Download

The Office 365 for IT Pros team is delighted to welcome the new year with the 103^rd monthly update for the Office 365 for IT Pros (2024 edition eBook. The updated files are now available for subscribers to download from Gumroad.com (the EPUB/PDF version) or Amazon. The book’s change log contains outline details of the major updates applied during December. More information about fetching updates is available in the FAQ.

December Articles on Office 365 for IT Pros Blog

Despite the shortness of the working month, December 2023 saw the team investigate different topics in Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Entra ID, Microsoft Purview, and Microsoft 365 Copilot. Amongst the articles published were the following selection:

• Exclude Breakglass Accounts from Conditional Access Policies with PowerShell
• How the Auto-label Retention Label Policy for Cloudy Attachments Works
• Entra ID Captures Timestamp for Last Successful Sign In for User Accounts
• Blocking the Welcome Message for Microsoft 365 Groups
• Reporting Entra ID Admin Consent Requests (for OAuth Apps)
• Creating a Hold Report for Microsoft Purview eDiscovery Cases
• Using Microsoft 365 Copilot for Word
• Exchange Online Retention Policies and the Deleted Items Folder

Just because we publish an article about a topic doesn’t mean that the information turns up in the book. Something that we discover when researching a theme might only warrant a brief mention in a paragraph. Others end up as complete sections that we develop over time.

In other words, there’s no direct correlation between an article showing up on Office365itpros.com and the eBook content. The aim here is to share information about interesting aspects of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem as we discover facts and insights. If we included everything in the book, we’d end up with a 2,500-page monster. 1,350 pages is quite enough.

Office 365 for IT Pros: 2023 in Review

My full review of the Microsoft 365 year for 2023 is available on Practical365.com. In a nutshell, Microsoft’s marketing energies focus on Copilot for Microsoft 365 while their sales efforts look to increase the amount of licensing revenues they can extract from customers. There’s nothing wrong with a commercial company seeking to make money from an installed base; it’s just a pity that everything becomes quite so intense around one area, especially when the cost of acquiring and using Copilot for Microsoft 365 is probably higher than most tenants can afford. Hopefully the price will decline (or inflation will catch up) to bring AI-based assistance within the reach of all those who want it.

Many good things happened across Microsoft 365 during 2023 including better security for email (but too much spam still gets through, including obvious phishing attempts), the availability of the Teams 2.1 client (the sole client from March 31, 2024), and many Entra ID enhancements in an ongoing effort to secure connections. The number of apps in the Teams app store is 2,282 and growing, even if some of the apps need to be updated for the new client. There’s no doubt that Teams is a very popular app platform.

SharePoint Online is on a roll with initiatives like SharePoint Premium and SharePoint Embedded due to be revealed more broadly in 2024. During the year we’ll also be able to assess the true impact of the Microsoft 365 Backup offering, promised for delivery by the end of 2023 but still not in my tenant as I write this on December 31. I guess a few hours remain for the product to show up.

Time Passes By

Although we will see new products in 2024, one thing that won’t change is the need to keep on top of change. Our purpose and intent is to help our subscribers master change within Microsoft 365. On to monthly update #104!

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.

Huge Change in the Size and Coverage of Office 365 for IT Pros Since May 2015

The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook team is thrilled to announce the availability of the October update for Office 365 for IT Pros (2024 edition). This is the one hundredth update we’ve issued since the original publication of the book at the Microsoft Ignite conference in Chicago in May 2015. Like any of our monthly updates, Update #100 is packed full of valuable updates.

Things were all so simple in 2015. Most migrations were for Exchange 2007 and 2010 servers to Exchange Online. The transition to SharePoint Online hadn’t really begun because of a lack of tools. Skype for Business Online had replaced Lync Online. The original OneDrive client was proving just how bad synchronization could be. None of what’s now available in Microsoft Purview had appeared. Yammer was making waves, mostly because Microsoft marketing thought it was the next big thing (which it never became), and Teams didn’t come along until it appeared in preview in November 2016.

In November 2015, Office 365 had some 60 million users and the annual run rate for Microsoft cloud revenues was approximately $8 billion. The most recent figures put Office 365 paid seats at around 400 million and cloud revenues of 121.2 billion.

All of which meant that the majority of our first book covered Exchange Online and we could fit everything into just over 500 pages, which meant that we produced some printed copies with Microsoft’s help.

Roll on to update #100 and Office 365 is very different. Our page count is 1,338 pages with some 710,000 words. One chapter alone (23: Managing Microsoft 365 with PowerShell and the Graph) is 132 pages and we have over 1,300 PowerShell examples across the book. All of this is due to covering the change occurring across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem since 2015.

The October 2023 Update

Subscribers to the PDF/EPUB version can download the updated files from Gumroad.com. Amazon Kindle readers can ask Amazon support to make the update available to them. Our FAQ includes information about how to fetch updates. Details of what’s changed are documented in the change log.

The Next Phase for Office 365 for IT Pros

It’s becoming more and more obvious that Microsoft wants to move customers off the Office 365 products to the more expensive Microsoft 365 SKUs. New functionality like Microsoft 365 Copilot and the Loop app are licensed through Microsoft 365 SKUs and not available to Office 365. Making new functionality unavailable to Office 365 E3 and E5 license holders are deliberate product management decisions made by Microsoft. There is nothing in Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 that makes them more suitable to host Copilot or Loop.

Microsoft is perfectly at liberty to make whatever product management decisions they feel best serves their interests. And in some cases, upgrading from Office 365 to Microsoft 365 is absolutely the right thing for a customer to do.

Since the inception of the book, we have used Office 365 E3 as our baseline for coverage because it seems like this is the most common license in enterprise tenants. If a feature can be used with Office 365 E3, we’re very interested in it. If something requires higher-end or add-on licenses, we’re less likely to cover that feature. Going forward, it might be the case that Microsoft 365 E3 becomes the new baseline, especially if this is what’s needed to take advantage of the features and functionality flowing from Microsoft’s investments in artificial intelligence.

On to the Second Hundred

We had no conception about how quickly the technology landscape around Office 365 would change when we started writing in summer 2014. I wonder what innovations, new solutions, and product breakthroughs the next hundred updates will cover. That’s an interesting point to ponder.

Great Articles on Technical Web Sites Depend on Copy and Technical Editing

Next week, I shall be in Atlanta (GA) to attend The Experts Conference (TEC). I look forward to meeting many of my readers there along with folks like Mary-Jo Foley and redoubtable Greg Taylor of Microsoft, who I will debate about Microsoft’s attitude to on-premises customers and other topics.

During the event, I’ll be talking to potential writers for Practical365.com to explain how we bring the articles submitted by writers from original draft to published text. I first started writing for Windows NT Magazine in 1997. One of the books published based on Windows NT Magazine articles in 1998 is still available from Amazon. I have a copy of that book at home because it contains an article I wrote about Exchange 5.0.

The late 1990s was the heyday of technical magazines, and a single edition could include advertisements worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. With that kind of revenue, Windows NT Magazine could afford to invest in copy and technical editing. Articles might go through several review cycles to expand text, correct errors, and answer questions that authors had never thought about. Everyone went through the same process and the result was excellent articles by luminaries such as Paul Thurrott and Marc Russinovich in a monthly magazine that seldom failed to please. A lot of the credit for the magazine was due to the excellence of the editorial staff.

Time moves on and magazine revenues from print advertising disappeared. We now have technical web sites that fund themselves in a variety of ways, usually through some form of online advertising or sponsorship. Other things have changed too. Technology evolves much faster today, and authors no longer have months to assess a product comprehensively before they write about it.

Guidelines for Better Technical Articles

One thing that hasn’t changed are simple guidelines that every author can follow to produce better articles:

• Don’t include leading statements that aren’t backed up with evidence such as a link where readers can find more information about a topic. For instance, when stating that Teams has 300 million monthly active users, link to the source for this information (like an analyst briefing where Microsoft gave the number or an article from a reliable web site).
• Write in the active tense. For instance, “in this article, we review Exchange Online Protection” is better than “in this article, we will review Exchange Online Protection.”
• Always be clear about who the actor is when discussing some action. For example, the reader is left to guess what “it” refers to in this text: “It is important to understand that it is a partial TGT.” A better version is “It is important to understand that the ticket generated by Entra ID is a partial TGT.” The reader now knows that Entra ID is the actor.
• Avoid terms beloved by marketing like “seamless” and “super-powers.” Use plain English instead to make text more accessible to non-English readers. “Best practice” is another nebulous term that’s best avoided. Technology evolves so fast that the notion of best practice is hard to define.
• Use fewer words than more. Generally speaking, longer articles are less popular because many readers consume text on mobile devices. The maximum word count for a long-form article is now around 1,500 words where magazine articles in the past often exceeded 3,000 words.
• Don’t clutter articles up with large numbers of screen shots. IT professionals do not need text written in the style of a child’s comic book. Each screenshot should be essential to the story and add significant value to the narrative.
• Don’t bother repeating information that’s available in Microsoft documentation. Link to the documentation and use the article to discuss information that Microsoft’s writers don’t cover.

The ideal situation is where authors tell an informative story from start to finish in an article. Knowing what story to tell is often difficulty for authors, but going into that problem requires more space than available here.

Sad Standard Seen in Some Technical Web Sites

The sad thing is that many sites don’t do a very good job of editing. I read articles across a variety of technical web sites in an attempt to identify potential authors for Practical365.com and am dismayed when I see text littered with basic errors. Or articles that could reduce the number of words by 20% and still have the same value.

A recent example is an article about how to create Microsoft 365 mailboxes that describes a distribution group mailbox (no such object exists). This is probably a simple error that the editor should have picked up (if they know about Microsoft 365 or Exchange Online). The article also recommends using cmdlets from the Microsoft Online Services module to assign licenses to new user accounts. This is in spite of the fact that MSOL cmdlets that assign licenses don’t work anymore (as some are discovering to their discomfort). For the last two years, Microsoft has advised customers to upgrade license management scripts to use the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK. I can’t understand how the site can publish such rubbish unless they practice “light editing,” meaning that their editing consists of uploading text to the site and pressing the big “Publish” button.

Avoiding Errors in Technical Web Sites

We make mistakes when publishing Practical365.com articles too. But we do our best to avoid errors by putting submitted articles through a copy and technical editing process. Copy editing clarifies and improves text (it still amazes me when authors submit text replete with spelling and grammatical errors). Technical editing examines the text to detect errors in statements made about the technology or code examples. Editorial exists to help authors publish articles containing the best possible text. It’s possible (and happens occasionally) that errors still appear on the site. When that happens, our policy is to correct the issue as quickly as possible.

Editing can be uncomfortable for authors if they feel that the process is too intense or points out too many issues with their writing. I’ve been told by an author that our editing “removed their voice.” That’s sad, but only because their text basically needed a complete rewrite to make sense and justify publication. Just because you think your text is good enough doesn’t mean that an editor has to agree.

Come Talk to Us at TEC

If you attend TEC and are interested in writing for Practical365.com, please visit our stand and chat with Jacob Stokes or myself. We’re always looking for new talent, people who can make technology come alive through their writing. From our side of the house, we will dedicate the right editorial resources to make your writing as good as possible when publishing your articles – and that’s a promise.

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 #92 Released to Subscribers

The Office 365 for IT Pros writing team is pleased to announce the availability of monthly update #93 for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. Subscribers to the EPUB/PDF version can download the updated files from Gumroad.com while Kindle subscribers must contact Amazon support to ask them to release the updates. Please consult our FAQ for more information about obtaining updated files.

Update #92 includes changes to many chapters. More details about the major changes covered this month are in our change log. However, it’s important to realize that we do not document every small change made in chapters. For instance, if we rewrite a paragraph to improve its clarity or make a point more forcibly, we might not note that fact. It’s all part of the constant maintenance we perform for the book.

User Feedback

We love receiving feedback from readers and were happy to receive several notes in January that helped us to improve the book. If you find something that doesn’t seem right or could be clearer, let us know by sending email to me. Before you do, please check the latest update to make sure that the fault exists there. When you write, it’s great if you include the chapter name, the heading where the problem exists, and details of why you think we’ve got something wrong.

82 Different Countries

As our subscribers know, we use Gumroad.com to distribute Office 365 for IT Pros. Every year, Gumroad lets us know where our books go. In 2022, people in 82 countries subscribed to Office 365 for IT Pros. The top ten countries for subscribers are:

• United States.
• United Kingdom.
• Germany.
• Australia.
• Canada.
• The Netherlands.
• Switzerland.
• Belgium.
• France.
• New Zealand.

It’s a great feeling to know that our work gets to so many places. We know that Office 365 is available in many more countries (Microsoft says 249 different markets), so we’ve still got some room to grow.

Microsoft 365 Security for IT Pros

On 16 January 2023, the team that takes care of the Microsoft 365 Security for IT Pros eBook released their 2023 edition. We don’t have anything to do with the Security book, which is staffed by a team of competent individuals that don’t need our help. We like to think that the Security book learned from our processes and procedures, but that’s about the limit of the connection. If you want to contact the security book team, head over to their website.

Time Running Out to Upgrade Azure AD PowerShell Scripts

We’ve invested a lot of time to continually improve and expand the coverage of the Microsoft Graph and the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK in Chapter 23 of Office 365 for IT Pros. PowerShell is a critical automation tool for Microsoft 365 tenant administrators and we are very conscious that time is running out to upgrade scripts written using cmdlets from the Azure AD, Azure AD Preview, and MSOL (Microsoft Online Services) modules. Although the formal deadline to retire these modules is June 30, 2023, the license management cmdlets will stop working from March 31, 2023, after Microsoft 365 switches to a new licensing platform.

Make sure that your scripts are ready for the transition. Migrations are always painful, but at least if you understand the technology and understand how the Graph works, you can take on the task of switching out old cmdlets with confidence. Before you do, be sure to read the sections in Chapter 23 that deal with the Graph and the Graph SDK. We’ll continue to update our coverage by adding new examples to Chapter 23 to help people through the migration with confidence.

Enjoy Update #92!

Office 365 for IT Pros Monthly Update #91

Lots of things happened in December 2022 to give the Office 365 for IT Pros writing team work to do. Among the changes are:

• Azure AD: Support for IPV6, registration for Linux devices, new branding options for tenants, and general availability of multi-tenant passwordless authentication through Authenticator for iOS.
• Exchange Online: The deployment of cloud (aka roaming) email signatures is showing up in Outlook for Windows and causing heartache for some organizations. RBAC for Applications is available in preview. This is important because it’s the new method to limit the access that apps have to user mailboxes.
• PowerShell: Microsoft is removing remote PowerShell for Exchange Online with the final deprecation due by July 2023. The preview of the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK V2.0 includes some good updates; it also proposes changes that will lead to the need to update scripts.
• SharePoint Online/OneDrive for Business: The sharing dialog now shows the sensitivity label assigned to a document (if one exists).
• Microsoft 365 Groups: The collaboration policy blacklist or whitelist can accept up to 25,000 characters, which should be enough to block 1,600 domains if you so choose.
• Teams: Meeting co-organizers can manage breakout rooms. Test licenses are available for Teams Premium. The new webinar experience is showing up in tenants. Users can add people to group chats with an @ mention.
• Compliance: communications compliance policies will accept adaptive scopes to define the scope of policies from February 2023.

All of this and more is in monthly update #91 of the Office 365 for IT Pros (2023 Edition) eBook, the only book updated monthly to cover the constantly changing Microsoft 365 Office ecosystem.

Ongoing Change

The list above is just a snapshot of the changes made across the book. More detail is available in our change log. We’re not always as good as we should be at recording precisely what changes appear in chapters. Suffice to say that there’s lots going on every month within Microsoft 365. This simple fact underlines and emphasizes the value of being able to publish a completely refreshed book monthly. No one likes dealing with outdated information and we do our best to make sure that our subscribers have the most current data available to them.

Download Updated Files

Subscribers of the EPUB/PDF version can fetch the updated files from their Gumroad account or by using the link in the receipt emailed to them when they bought the book. Amazon readers can ask the Amazon support team to refresh their book. More detail about downloading updated book files is available in our FAQ.

Office 365 for IT Pros in 2023

Development continues at full pace and the number of updates Microsoft releases has not reduced. The Microsoft 365 admin center team has made several changes to improve the quality of communication around changes and to help administrators understand the impact of individual changes on tenants. The addition of a release status for updates is the latest improvement.

Our mission is to track the changes as Microsoft announces them in message center notifications, blogs, and other places, analyze the updates, and figure out if they’re important enough to include in the book. We do not include everything because some of the announced changes are simply user interfaces updates. Instead, we focus on what’s important to tenant administrators. As we enter 2023, our dedication to tracking and documenting change within Microsoft 365 continues. We hope that you find our work and output useful and will continue to do so as the new year unfolds.

So much change, all the time. It’s a challenge to stay abreast of all the updates Microsoft makes across Office 365. Subscribe to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook to receive monthly insights into what happens, why it happens, and what new features and capabilities mean for your tenant.

Download Office 365 for IT Pros eBook Updates Now

The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook team is delighted to announce the availability of the December 2022 update for Office 365 for IT Pros (2023 edition). This is the 90^th monthly update delivered since May 2015. As with all our updates, we’d appreciate if our subscribers can download the new files when convenient. There’s no point in us updating chapters if subscribers don’t use the new content.

Subscribers to the EPUB/PDF version can download the updates from their Gumroad.com or by using the link in the receipt received by email after buying the book. If you have difficulties getting into your Gumroad.com account, please send email to support at gumroad dot com.

Those who bought a copy from Amazon.com should contact Amazon support for access to the updated files. The Amazon Kindle model struggles with books that receive regular updates (as you probably know, most novels are never updated), so there’s no way available to us to distribute automatic updates. It’s one of the more frustrating aspects of working with Kindle.

For more information about how to obtain book updates, please consult our FAQ.

Changes in Office 365 for IT Pros December 2022

Like any month, the December 2022 update includes a bunch of changes across large swathes of the book. Some details about the changes are listed in our change log. However, the notes in the change log don’t highlight the importance of some of the detailed updates. For instance, the latest version of the Microsoft PowerShell Graph SDK include refreshed group management cmdlets that address some of the shortcomings we listed previously. These restrictions no longer exist, or a more elegant solution is available. In either case, we’ve rewritten examples to clarify and explain the changes.

Other changes include:

• New tenant branding options for Azure AD sign-in screens.
• The Microsoft Authenticator app will implement mandatory number matching for its MFA challenges in February 2023.
• A relevance indicator is now available for Microsoft 365 message center notifications.
• Microsoft has pushed out the deployment date for a change they want to make to Exchange Online object naming.
• The deployment of roaming signatures for Outlook and OWA has now happened for Outlook subscription versions (it’s fair to say that some tenants are finding this has caused issues with ISV signature management products).
• Microsoft will implement a block to stop administrators attempting to move auto-expanding archives back to on-premises Exchange. Apart from speculating that someone tried this and failed abysmally, we have no idea why Microsoft is doing this.
• Yammer stories are now available. Not many people noticed.
• Teams now supports a delete chat option.
• The Teams Common Area phone license is now the Teams Shared device license. And there’s a good reason why.
• The Office click-to-run desktop clients now have full native support for information protection, so Microsoft will stop tenants using the unified labeling client to apply sensitivity labels.
• Tons of changes in the PowerShell chapter. And we mean lots.

To go along with our headline changes, we have many other smaller updates in chapters.

Not All Chapters Updated

Some might ask why not all content chapters received updates. The usual reason is that we don’t have anything compelling that must be changed in those chapters. In other cases, it might be that we’re waiting for Microsoft to complete the delivery of functionality or for a set of changes to come together (for example, all released from preview to general availability) so that we go over an area once.

But don’t worry: we keep an eye on everything that we can using as many sources as we can consume to stay on top of what’s happening.

Please Update!

As always, we close with an appeal to go ahead and update book files now. We hate to think that someone might read and use outdated information when an update is available. It’s important to us that you use the best and most complete information we can deliver. It’s how it should be.

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!

88^th Update for the Ultimate Office 365 Book

The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook team is delighted to announce that the October 2022 update for the 2023 edition is now available for subscribers to download. This is the 88^th update issued for the book as we strive to keep abreast of the changes across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.

Subscribers to the PDF/EPUB version can download the updated files from Gumroad by either going to their Gumroad account or using the link in the receipt emailed to them when they bought the book. When downloading from Gumroad, you always get the latest files, including any small changes that we release between regular monthly updates. Our FAQ offers further advice about downloading updates.

If you bought a book from Amazon, you’ll need to go to Amazon support to ask them to make the update available to you. The difficulties of getting updates from Amazon is one of the reasons why we recommend people to buy the PDF/EPUB version, which is easily transferred to Kindle devices.

Changes in Office 365 for IT Pros October 2022

Full details of the changes made since the original release of the 2023 edition are available in our change log. In some respects, this was a light month because Microsoft is reserving announcements for its Ignite conference in mid-October. We expect to hear announcements about many new features and capabilities within Microsoft 365 at Ignite and will work on covering the practical details about these changes over the coming months.

Here are some of the changes incorporated into the October 2022 update.

• Azure AD sign-in frequency control and advice about guests leaving tenants. Microsoft also revealed some interesting data about the percentage of Azure AD accounts with admin permissions that are MFA-enabled. Suffice to say that it’s not high enough. We need to do better.
• Updated description of Score Score, something that we all strive to excel at.
• Microsoft provided some interesting data about Exchange Online at the MEC event. Meantime, we rewrote the sections covering automapping and some parts about archive mailboxes.
• Rewrote description about DKIM key rotation. As it turns out, this isn’t as automatic a process as Microsoft once intended.
• You can now record 15-minute videos with the new Stream client. And the Stream Classic migration heads into public preview in October. And there’s a new build of the Stream 2.0 mobile client (still missing important functionality though).
• Added section about scheduled send for Teams chat. Noted that video messages can be included in Teams chats.
• Reactions to Teams messages are captured in audit records.
• New licensing rules for Teams rooms.
• The Linux desktop client for Teams retires in December 2022. A new build is available for the Outlook Monarch client.
• A preview of a new audit search GUI is available (we don’t like it).
• Power Apps Express Design is available.
• Version 3.0 of the Exchange Online PowerShell module is available (this version supports managed identities amongst other things). Microsoft has set a revised retirement date for the Azure AD and MSOL modules to be 30 June 2023. However, the license management cmdlets stop working on 31, March 2023, so we added some more licensing examples.

Many more minor changes are in all chapters across the book. Sometimes we’re not very good at noting exactly what changed, but because we release a completely refreshed book with all the changes in context, this is less important than if we expected readers to match changes with existing text.

The companion volume received a minor update in September. Its release date is now 28 September, 2022.

Off to Ignite

We’ll be keeping a close eye on Ignite and whatever developments unfold there. At the same time, there’s always a bunch of message center notifications to process, decide if they cover something that we need to include in the book, and make the changes. It’s a never-ending cycle, but at least it kept us busy.

Updated Files Available for Subscribers to Download

The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook team is proud to announce the availability of the September 2022 update for Office 365 for IT Pros (2023 Edition), the 87^th monthly update in a series stretching back to May 2015 (to learn mode, read our history page). Subscribers to the EPUB/PDF version can download the updated files from Gumroad.com. Remember that you can always use the link in the receipt emailed to you after buying the book to download the latest files.

Those who bought the Kindle version from Amazon can contact Amazon support to secure the updates. Yes, it’s a pain going through Amazon… which is why we recommend that people buy the EPUB/PDF version and send the files to your Kindle if you want to read the text there. Incidentally, if you’ve browsed Amazon recently, you might have seen that we have both the 2022 and 2023 editions available. That’s simply to allow those who bought the Kindle version of the 2022 edition to update their files before we withdraw the book, probably at the end of 2022.

Further information about downloading updates is available from our FAQ page.

Mixed Bag of Updates

Like every month, the September 2022 update of Office 365 for IT Pros contains a mixed bag of changes, refinements, and new information spread across the 23 content chapters. The change log details updates for individual chapters since the original launch of the 2023 edition.

Selected changes include:

• Introduction of the Adoption Score option in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
• Coverage of the Power Apps Code Review tool.
• A new API to control obfuscation of report data generated from the Graph.
• A new setting to stop SharePoint from generating document mismatch notifications.
• New pay-as-you-go license for Teams devices.
• Changes in adaptive scope filters (for retention policies).
• New setting to control Fluid components in OneNote meeting notes.
• The quarantined expiration period for email is now 30 days.
• The deleted mailbox retention period for inactive mailboxes is reduced from 183 days to 30 days.
• The migration tool for Stream classic to Stream on SharePoint didn’t make its late August availability date. Microsoft still hopes to meet the end of year deadline for general availability of this tool.
• People can use Exchange distribution lists and Microsoft 365 groups to start group chats.
• New dates for the retirement of Exchange Web Services (EWS) capabilities.
• A new SLA for Office 365 (Q2 2022). Unsurprisingly, this was 99.98%. Even though outages occur all the time, the distribution of Office 365 services across multiple datacenter regions and the sheer size of its operation to serve > 350 million accounts means that only a very long and widespread outage can move the SLA needle.
• Microsoft changed the strategy for the retirement of the licensing cmdlets in the MSOL and Azure AD PowerShell modules. The date was 26 August 2022, and now it’s pushed out to March 2023. This isn’t a reason to ignore the need to update scripts to change the old cmdlets with cmdlets from the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK. In passing, I note that our PowerShell chapter is now almost a mini-book in its own right, including tons of coverage about using PowerShell with the Microsoft Graph.
• A bunch of new Teams cmdlets is available to help manage shared channels, including the valuable Get-TeamAllChannel cmdlet.

In addition, there’s a bunch of other smaller changes, clarifications, minor updates, grammar fixes, and so on in all chapters. We don’t document the smaller changes because there are too many of them and our time is better spent chasing information about how things really work inside Office 365.

Now to Update 88

With September’s update in the bag, we turn our attention to update #88 for Office 365 for IT Pros. The update is due for release on 1 October 2022. Another month, another update, and another chance to harass writers to turn in their text on time. At least it keeps us busy!

Subscribers Can Download Files for Update 86

The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook team is delighted to announce the release of the August 2022 update (monthly update number 86 in the series) for Office 365 for IT Pros (2023 edition). Subscribers of the EPUB/PDF version can download the updated files using the link in the receipt they received via email for their book or through their Gumroad account. We’ve also updated the Amazon Kindle version, but buyers of that version must contact Amazon support to get the updates.

For more information about downloading book updates, please see our FAQ.

First Update Covers Many Bases

This is the first update for the 2023 edition. Authors updated 21 of the 23 content chapters to cover anything from information given by Microsoft about Office 365 usage at their FY22 Q4 results to details of how to manage SharePoint Online tenant settings using Graph API requests. Some work items that we couldn’t complete for the original publication of the 2023 edition, like an overhaul of the section dealing with Exchange Online inactive mailboxes, writing up some additional examples of using Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK cmdlets, and rewrites of sections of the Teams Calling and Devices chapter, are now in the book. Elsewhere, we’ve done some tweaking to clarify and expand coverage of different topics.

All in all, update 86 is typical of the effort necessary to keep abreast of what’s happening inside Office 365 and the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, but as any tenant administrator knows, it’s important to keep on top of what’s happening inside Microsoft’s cloud office services, which is perhaps why Mary-Jo Foley said that “If you’re an [Office 365] admin, you basically need and want this book.“ when covering Office 365 for IT Pros during episode 784 of the Windows Weekly podcast on 6 July.

More details of the changes in each chapter are available in our change log.

Changes in August

More change is coming in August. Microsoft is scheduled to move Microsoft 365 to a new licensing platform on August 26, an action that will stop the licensing cmdlets in the MSOL and Azure AD modules working. We’re fully prepared for the changeover as the book includes lots of information and example commands to deal with licensing for Azure AD accounts through the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK. I suspect that Microsoft will push the August 26 date out a little because of customer pushback, but the change will happen soon.

We’ll also get to test the cmdlets Microsoft released in V4.6 of the Microsoft Teams PowerShell module to help manage shared channels. The updated module appeared on July 29, which was a little tight for us to get the information into the August update.

Final Countdown for Basic Authentication

October 1 marks the date for the final transition away from basic authentication for Exchange Online. Apple iOS 15.6 updates are rolling out to customers. This is an important upgrade because it contains the code necessary to allow iOS mail app profiles to switch automatically from basic to modern authentication. That is, if tenant administrators have done the work to make this possible. If you haven’t already, it’s time to prepare your tenant for the iOS mail app profile upgrade, and while you’re at it, check that ActiveSync clients from other vendors support modern authentication.

Remember that the deprecation of basic authentication affects seven email connectivity protocols. Check any IMAP4 and POP3 clients and apps in use to make sure that they can cope with the new regime after October 1. Finally, make sure that all your PowerShell scripts will work after Microsoft turns basic authentication off. Note that Microsoft will deprecate connecting to Exchange Online with PowerShell using “the old New-PSSession method” on October 1. The Exchange Online management module fully supports modern authentication along with access to all the older non-REST-based cmdlets.

We have lots of work to do as we work on future updates for Office 365 for IT Pros.

Ninth Release in the Series Going Back to 2015

The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook team are proud to announce the release of the ninth (2023) edition of the book. The book files are now available from Gumroad.com. We have sent email to subscribers to the 2022 edition containing a discount code to allow them to continue their subscription for the 2023 edition.

Like every year, we take a couple of months to do an end-to-end technical refresh to create a new edition. Vasil Michev reviews every chapter for technical accuracy. The chapter authors look for opportunities to remove obsolete or duplicate material while they’re busily inserting new content. We also restructured the chapters to make the book flow better.

Apart from Ståle Hansen, all the authors from the 2022 edition return for the 2023 edition. Ståle is now too busy running his successful CloudWay consulting company, and we’re glad that Ståle nominated Ben Lee to take his place. Our other contributors (Paul Robichaux, Brian Desmond, Gareth Gudger, Juan Carlos Martinez, and Christina Wheeler) did a great job of driving me to drink in the ongoing struggle between authors and editor as we brought the book together. I think you’ll like the results.

The 2023 edition marks the 85^th monthly update since we started the Office 365 for IT Pros project in 2014 (the first edition appeared at the Microsoft Ignite Conference in Chicago in May 2015 in both print and electronic formats). We update monthly because it’s the only way to keep current with developments across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. The number of updates made in a year is around 350 chapter changes, but we think that a monthly update cycle creates a living and unique book.

Updating Azure AD PowerShell

In this edition, we took the decision to upgrade every PowerShell example based on the MSOL and Azure AD modules to use the Microsoft Graph SDK for PowerShell or Microsoft Graph API requests. Microsoft plans to deprecate the Azure AD Graph and PowerShell modules sometime soon, possibly in early 2023, and it didn’t seem to make much sense to keep using examples based on old and soon-to-be-obsolete code. We’re down to ten or so mentions of Azure AD cmdlets in the book, eight of which are in the section explaining how guest users can update their account photos in host tenants, something that can’t be done with Graph SDK cmdlets. But we shall monitor the development of the SDK cmdlets and you never know, we might be able to remove those lingering remnants soon.

Foreword by the Father of PowerShell

The foreword for the 2023 edition is by Jeffry Snover. He’s renowned as the father of PowerShell, but that only scratches the surface of what Jeffrey accomplished at Microsoft. His work on the Microsoft 365 substrate is foundational to the search, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and other services running inside Microsoft 365 today. And best of all, he’s a great guy. His foreword is worth reading even if you’re not interested in Office 365 for IT Pros.

The Book Structure

We’ve divided Office 365 for IT Pros (2023 edition) into seven parts and moved some of the tables where we capture data like the Office 365 SLA over time into an appendix. Each part of the book is almost like a standalone book. For now, here’s the structure we use (the book’s table of contents is at the end of this post).

Part 1: The Basics

Chapter 1: Overview

Chapter 2: Embracing the Cloud

Chapter 3: Managing Identities (Azure AD)

Chapter 4: Managing Your Tenant

Chapter 5: Managing Users

Part 2: The Workloads

Chapter 6: Managing Exchange Online

Chapter 7: Managing Mail Flow

Chapter 8: Managing SharePoint Online

Chapter 9: Managing Tasks

Chapter 10: Managing Videos

Part 3: Groups and Teams

Chapter 11: Managing Microsoft 365 Groups

Chapter 12: Teams Architecture

Chapter 13: Managing Teams

Chapter 14: Managing Teams Calling and Devices (Teams Voice)

Part 4: Clients and Devices

Chapter 15: Managing Clients

Chapter 16: Managing Devices with Intune

Part 5: Data Governance

Chapter 17: Managing Microsoft 365 Compliance

Chapter 18: Managing eDiscovery

Chapter 19: Managing Data Loss Prevention

Chapter 20: Managing Information Protection

Chapter 21: Managing Reporting and Auditing

Part 6: Extensibility and Automation

Chapter 22: Power Platform

Chapter 23: Managing Your Tenant with PowerShell and the Graph

Part 7: Sponsor Chapter

Appendix

Companion Volume

We’ve created another companion volume for this edition. Much of the information in the companion volume is now very old, but we are told that people like to have it, so it’s there. We have moved the old Stream (classic) content from the main book to the companion volume.

Thanks Quest!

We’d like to thank our sponsor, Quest Software, for their ongoing support. We could not undertake the amount of effort necessary to build and maintain a 1,301 page, 660,000-word book without their help. Quest run a terrific in-person event called The Experts Conference. The next event is in Atlanta on September 20-21. We’d love to meet with Office 365 for IT Pros readers there.

Table of Contents for Office 365 for IT Pros (2023 Edition)

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!

Tenth Update Issued for the 2022 Edition

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

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

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

Chasing Typos

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

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

Grammarly Blues

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

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

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

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

Please Download and Use the Update

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

Office 365 for IT Pros Update #82 Available Now

The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook team is delighted to announce that the April 2022 update for the 2022 edition is available for download. This is the 82^nd update we’ve produced over eight editions in a series going back to May 2015.

Subscribers can use the book link in their Gumroad account to download the updates EPUB and PDF files. Alternatively, use the download link in the Gumroad receipt issued for the book purchase. For more details about downloads, see our FAQ. The updated files are also available for Amazon Kindle.

The Azure AD PowerShell Transition

We want to bring a massive change that’s coming soon to your attention. Microsoft is deprecating the Azure AD and MSOL PowerShell modules. The first effect will be felt on August 26, 2022, when the license management cmdlets stop working because Microsoft moves to a new license management platform. Microsoft will cease support for the remaining cmdlets in the two modules in late 2022 or early 2023.

The effect on Office 365 for IT Pros is massive. The book chapters feature hundreds of examples of using Azure AD cmdlets to get work done. Years ago, we dropped the older MSOL module where possible (introduced in 2012) and replaced the examples with Azure AD (introduced in 2015). Now we’ll go ahead and update all examples to use cmdlets from the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK. We’ve started this work already and you’ll see a lot more coverage about effective use of the SDK in the coming months, starting with a huge revision to chapter 14 in the April 2022 update. It will take us time to work through all our code, just like it will take you time to inventory and update scripts which use these modules.

Usually, we would wait for a new edition to introduce a change of this magnitude. However, the need to move away from the Azure AD and MSOL modules will have such a large impact on scripts that we thought it best to start now and work through all chapters over the coming months. This is where being an exclusively electronic book helps. Printed books are great, but they can’t deal with the kind of change experienced inside the Microsoft Cloud.

More Cloud Change

Change isn’t just happening in PowerShell. Updates continue to flow across all workloads, and we made many other changes across chapters this month, including coverage of Azure AD B2B Direct Connect, Teams shared channels, changes in the certificates used by Microsoft 365, new Exchange Online settings to control plus addressing and send from proxy addresses, Operator Mobile Connect for Teams, and a rewrite of some sections of the Mail Flow chapter. We also made minor changes in a bunch of places to chase down spelling or grammar errors, fix hyperlinks, and everything else that can go wrong in 660,000 words.

Please take the time to download the updated files so that you can take advantage of the updated text. You’re paying for up-to-date content, so you should use it.

Companion Volume

We did not update the companion volume this month. We might do so next month by transferring examples of PowerShell using the Azure AD module to a chapter so that people still have access to this content. After all, the cmdlets will continue working, even when they move to an unsupported state

Thanks for your ongoing support for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook project. We look forward to doing the hard work to track the changes in April and deliver update #83 in May.

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.

Eighth Edition of the Only Constantly Updated eBook About Office 365 Available Now

Microsoft begins its new fiscal year on July 1, which is why we chose that date to launch our annual refresh of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. Now in its eighth edition, the new eBook is available on Gumroad.com. We have emailed subscribers to the prior edition a code to enable a low-cost extension of their subscription to cover the 2022 edition.

Changes in the 2022 Edition

What’s changed in this edition?

• A new foreword by Jared Spataro, Corporate VP for Microsoft 365.
• We’ve refreshed the writing team by bringing in Christina Wheeler and Gareth Gudger, both very experienced MVPs. Christina covers the Power Platform in Chapter 22 while Gareth deals with the complexities of mail flow in Chapter 9.
• Added many new facts and insights covering recent changes.
• We’ve done an end-to-end technical and content review of all chapters to:
  • Remove redundant text. Some of this (such as the discussion about configuring Azure AD Connect) is now in the companion volume.
  • Track down bad hyperlinks (we found a few). We’ve also replaced a few links with new links to better articles or other explanatory text.
  • Fix any technical spelling, grammatical, and other errors found during the review. Errors do creep in over time. We know we should catch these issues during our monthly update cycles, but sometimes they are overlooked, which is why we do this exhaustive end-to-end check annually.
  • Checked screen shots to discover ones which are now outdated and to remove a few which we don’t think add much value.
  • Validate all code examples and improve the code in a few. Code examples are not fully-working solutions. They’re designed to show the principles of how things work. We rely on our readers to turn examples into full solutions. You can download many of the example scripts from our GitHub repository.
• Restructure content into what we think is a more logical flow.
• Move content around in the new structure to keep information together when appropriate (this also highlighted some redundancies which we’ve removed).

The volume of change across Office 365 has been immense since we started the Office 365 for IT Pros journey in mid-2014. We made over 200 major chapter updates to the 2021 edition and released 11 monthly updates since its release in July 2020. We do not anticipate doing less work for this edition. Overall, we feel that the new book lays a solid foundation for all the changes we know will happen and need coverage during the tenure of the 2022 edition.

Kindle Version Not There Yet

Some changes in the Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) model prevented the release of a Kindle version. It could be that the 1,250 pages and 600,000 words of Office 365 for IT Pros challenges the KDP model. In any case, we will work with Amazon to see if a Kindle version is possible. For now, we recommend that anyone who wants to read the book on Kindle should buy the EPUB/PDF version and covert the EPUB file to MOBI format before transferring it to the Kindle. Apart from anything else, this route means that you’ll hear about the monthly updates as we release the files. We cannot communicate with people who buy from Amazon direct.

July 2 update: The book is now online in a Kindle version.

Thanks to Our Subscribers

We sincerely thank our subscribers for their support for the Office 365 for IT Projects since its first edition. Without your support, and the financial support of the book’s sponsors, Quest Software, we could not afford to spend the time needed to research, understand, analyze, and write about new Office 365 features as Microsoft makes updates available. Now that we’ve released the 2022 edition, the writing team will take a couple of days off before we start to prepare the August 2021 update for the new book. Yes, at times it feels like we’re like hamsters on a turn wheel!

Existing subscribers who haven’t received an update code should check their junk email folder to see if the message landed there. If not, please contact O365ITPros2022Edition at office365itpros.com and we’ll sort you out.

New subscribers can buy a subscription here.

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).

World’s Only Always Current eBook About Office 365 Continues to Evolve

The Office 365 for IT Pros team is pleased to announce the availability of the 7^th update for the 2021 edition.

The February update includes changes to 22 of the 24 content chapters ranging from the end of life for IE11 support in Intune to the ability to create Flow from Visio diagrams and using distribution lists for Teams DLP policies. We also introduce several new example scripts. Several typos and errors are corrected and additional information about features (like using complex filters for dynamic distribution lists) are included. A ton of minor updates were made to improve the insight and accuracy of chapters. See the change log for full information about what’s been updated each month since the publication of the 2021 edition.

Please Download Updates

Subscribers to the EPUB/PDF version can download the updated files from their Gumroad.com account or by using the link in the original receipt for the book purchase. The FAQ includes information about downloading updated files. Subscribers of the Amazon Kindle version can ask Amazon to make the new files available.

Given the number of updated chapters this time round, we did not have the time to update anything in the companion volume. We have a couple of changes lined up that will appear in the March update.

Please download the updated files at your convenience. We appreciate your support for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook project.

Twenty One Chapters Updated in Monthly Refresh

The Office 365 for IT Pros team is delighted to announce that the sixth update for the 2021 edition is now available. Updated files have been uploaded to Gumroad.com for subscribers of the EPUB/PDF version to download. We have not updated the companion volume, so you only need to download the main book. Please use the link in your Gumroad account or the receipt you received for the book to download the latest files. See our FAQ for more information.

Chapter Changes

Although Microsoft stopped pushing updates out into Office 365 in the middle of December, we still updated 21 of 24 chapters this month. Details of the changes are shown below (details for all updates are available in our change log):

If you’re not already a subscriber, you can secure your copy at Gumroad.com (EPUB/PDF version) or Amazon (Kindle version).

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!

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?

September 2020 was an odd month. The Microsoft Ignite 2020 virtual conference happened over 48 hours to give us plenty to think about as we plan future monthly updates for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. We even managed to cover some of the new features which are available now in the October update. But what was strange was the amount of change which Microsoft introduced into Office 365 before Ignite. They certainly didn’t keep things wrapped up until the conference started and many updates appeared over the month. So much so that the result is updates for 21 of the 24 content chapters in the book. You can find full details of the chapter updates in our change log.

More Changes Coming

We expect the pace of change to pick up over the next several months as Microsoft release features announced at Ignite as previews or into general availability. This will add to other changes in the work that get posted as Office 365 notifications in the Message Center in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

Many of the changes announced in Office 365 notifications are tweaks to the UI of an application. We don’t tend to cover changes like that in the book unless they affect the way an application works or is managed. Office365itpros.com exists to document changes that we think are interesting at a level of detail that we can’t afford in the book unless the page count was to expand well past its current 1,200-odd limit.

Updates Available for Download

Subscribers can now download the October update through Gumroad.com (for EPUB/PDF subscribers) or Amazon (for Kindle). Our FAQ has lots of useful information about how to access updated files. Please download and use the updated files. We put a lot of effort into the monthly updates and it’s nice to know that the work is used.

We did not update the companion volume for October 2020.

Cloud Changes Mean the Book Changes Too

Time marches on and the cloud keeps on changing. Although August is a peak vacation period, Microsoft has pushed out many changes during the month. We also see several new features in preview that should become generally available in the near future, so we know that we’ll be busy understanding that technology along with whatever surprises Microsoft reveals during the Ignite 2020 virtual conference later this month.

Updated Files for Download

Updated files for the September 2020 revision of the Office 365 for IT Pros (2021 Edition) eBook are now available for download. If you bought the EPUB/PDF version of the book through Gumroad.com, you can download the files through your Gumroad account or with the link in the receipt you received on purchase. Kindle buyers can ask Amazon to make the updated files available to them. See our FAQ for more information about downloads. The version number for the book is shown on the inside front cover. The PDF also includes the month of release in the footer of each page.

We did not update the companion volume for September 2020.

September Changes

Seventeen of the twenty-four content chapters are updated for September. Some of the changes are relatively small, but there are some important topics covered. Microsoft is deprecating Internet Explorer 11 for Office 365, with Teams the first app to cease support in November. Microsoft 365 Groups can now have Azure AD roles assigned to them, but only for new groups. Microsoft Lists is now rolling out for SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Teams. Some changes to organization settings for the tenant can only be made using a Graph API, but you can use the Graph Explorer tool to get the job done without writing any code. And tenants which allow users to buy licenses through the self-service process will be able to purchase licenses for Project and Visio. There’s a heap of clarifications, rewordings, and a few bug fixes included in the mix too. See our change log for a full list of updates.

September 2020 marks the 65^th update for the Office 365 for IT Pros series. When we started on this journey, we never anticipated that the pace of cloud change could be quite so persistent and ongoing as it has turned out to be. At least it keeps us busy….

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).

All About the 2021 Edition of Office 365 for IT Pros

As readers know, the Office 365 for IT Pros team is busy creating the seventh (2021) edition of the book with the goal of releasing it on July 1, 2020.

Today, Paul Robichaux, Tony Redmond, and Vasil Michev gathered for a special episode of the Office 365 Exposed podcast to discuss the process of moving from one edition to the next. We talked about:

• Why we use a subscription model and why we create a new version annually (and the great offer we’ll make to existing subscribers for the 2021 edition).
• Other books that use the same model, like the new Microsoft 365 Security for IT Pros eBook that’s being led by Michael Van Horenbeeck, one of the original writers for Office 365 for IT Pros and Office 365 Best Recipes for Developers by Gustavo Velez, from our current team.
• The review process we use and why a good technical editor is so important to the overall quality of the book.
• How we updated the sixth (2020 edition) over the last twelve months.
• The tools we use to stay aware of changes in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.
• The problems we have with Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and why KDP isn’t set up to handle large technical books.

We finished up by selecting some recent developments inside Office 365 that had taken our interest.

You can listen to the podcast here or download it through your normal podcast aggregator.

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.

Biggest Set of Changes Ever

The Office 365 for IT Pros team is delighted to announce that subscribers can now download the December 2019 update for the 2020 Edition. Updated files are available for the EPUB/PDF version on Gumroad.com and for the Kindle version on Amazon. The Office 365 for IT Pros FAQ has more details about how subscribers can download book updates.

Given the volume of changes announced at the recent Microsoft Ignite 2019 conference in Orlando, we always knew that a massive update would come in December. Despite only covering functionality that we have had hands-on access to in generally available or preview software, we updated 21 of the 24 content chapters. The change log has details of changes made to each chapter.

Office 365 for IT Pros December Updates

Among the big changes covered in the December 2019 update are

• Description of the Office 365 substrate and its importance to Office 365.
• New MacOS interface for Outlook.
• Introduction of private channels and rich federated chat for Teams (including PowerShell support for private channels).
• Trimming for videos stored in Stream.
• Update for Microsoft Business Voice.
• Flow is now Power Automate.
• SharePoint Online support for Sensitivity Labels.

In addition to the changes mentioned in the change log, many other minor updates were made to keep the content of the book focused, accurate, and up to date.

If you’re a Office 365 for IT Pros subscriber, please download the updates now. If you’re not a subscriber, maybe you should become one and benefit from a book that is kept updated to match the ongoing change inside Office 365.

The Printed 600-page First Edition

In May 2015, Microsoft ran the first Ignite conference in Chicago and the Office 365 for IT Pros team launched the first edition of “Office 365 for Exchange Professionals,” a book dedicated to helping people master the darker corners of Microsoft’s cloud office service. We were very new at this self-publishing game and still harked back to the halcyon days of printed books in some of the way we approached production. Evidence of our eagerness to get hard copy versions of the book when we accepted Microsoft’s offer to print and distribute 500 copies at the conference.

Flushed with enthusiasm, we duly submitted a manuscript to Microsoft in early April 2015. The text had to be poured into Adobe InDesign, a high-end desktop publishing tool for a skilled professional to format the chapters and all the images and code examples we included into an attractive and readable format. Office 365 didn’t change at quite the pace that it does now or maybe we paid less attention to stuff that happened outside Exchange Online. Even so, we pestered Microsoft with changes and updates until we we told to stop because the book had to be printed.

The result was a book that looked good (Figure 1), even if the binding was a little fragile, and the recipients of the 500 copies distributed at the Exchange booth appreciated what they got (or so we think).

The ePublishing Decision

The experience of preparing the hard copy book for Microsoft Ignite 2015 convinced us to look at using InDesign to create printed copies on an ongoing basis. That effort lasted a month or so before we concluded that it was just too difficult to keep a big book updated with so many changes. Instead, we decided to put our efforts into some formatting changes in the Word template we used (and still use today) to make the PDF output look better, and to research what needed to be done to make electronic publishing really work.

Much of the work went into generating clean content for the EPUB files and for Amazon Kindle. We use the Calibre eBook software to generate the EPUB and MOBI files. After fiddling with various settings, we’re pretty happy with what gets generated, with the exception of some PowerShell formatting that is never quite as good as the PDF output.

Printing Services

People ask for hard copy books and we have considered printing services like BookBaby and Amazon over the years to figure out if it’s possible to generate good-looking printed books. Our conclusion is that it’s just not feasible because:

• At 1,200 pages, Office 365 for IT Pros is too large for online printing services.
• Although we keep images to a minimum, we have quite a few. Most online printing services are good at dealing with text but are less capable (or much more expensive) when graphics are involved. The cost also increases as the number of graphics grows.
• Printing services like books that don’t change very much. A look at The Office 365 for IT Pros change log for the monthly updates tells you what our problem is.
• Even if we could generate a printed copy, it would be very expensive at the relatively low volumes we would want. Remember, we have a new book every month. In the November 2019 update, we changed sixteen of twenty-four chapters. It would take a lot of effort and cost to port the changes over to a printed edition.

Some People Do Print

Even if we don’t generate hard copies, some people like printed output and we know of several who print the book every month. Some take the PDF to a commercial printing bureau while others use the printers available in their company. Binding the book is a challenge, so the usual approach is to put the pages into a punch-hole binder. Whatever works for you!

At this point we’re highly unlikely to consider creating a hard copy form of Office 365 for IT Pros. We think that the current model works well. The output is tweaked all the time to improve what our subscribers see and that’s where our focus will remain. We hope that you like the result.

Sixteen Content Chapters Updated for November

The Office 365 for IT Pros writing team is thrilled to announce that the November 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 sixteen 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 version of the main book now has a release date of 1 November 2019 while the release date for the companion volume remains 1 October 2019.

Preparing for Microsoft Ignite

With the Microsoft Ignite conference happening next week in Orlando, we have done a lot of work to prepare for the announcements of new functionality that Microsoft has flagged. We’ll cover these in the December update. For this update, we have news about sharing reports for SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, upgrades for Outlook mobile including support for Office 365 sensitivity labels, the impact of Microsoft’s Modern Lifecycle Policy on Teams, multi-channel posts for Teams, information about assigning phone numbers to Teams users, and many more changes (Figure 1). Our full change log is available online.

We expect a huge number of changes to be announced at the Microsoft Ignite conference. However, not all those changes will result in code that appears in Office 365 tenants soon, so we’ll concentrate on new features accessible to tenants in the near term for the December update. If you want to chat to us at the conference, you can find details of where we’ll be here.

Meet the Author Team at Microsoft Ignite 2019 in Orlando

The Office 365 for IT Pros author team is busily preparing for the Microsoft Ignite 2019 conference in Orlando (November 4-8). Here is the list of sessions that Office 365 for IT Pros authors are lined up to speak at (THR indicates a 20-minute theater session while BRK is a 45-minute breakout):

• Ståle Hansen will dig into the mysteries of direct routing for Teams with Session Border Controllers Your own Direct Routing SBC in Azure in 20 minutes (THR3061) on Thursday at 10:20AM. Ståle knows quite a bit about direct routing, so it will be interesting to see how much he can communicate in 20 minutes.
• Paul Robichaux will speak about the wonders of tenant-to-tenant migration in Email is the easy part: Five pitfalls to avoid in tenant-to-tenant migrations (THR2217). In a summary, email is easy to migrate, documents are slightly harder, Teams is horrible (for now).
• Brian Reid has one of the first theater sessions at 2:50PM on Monday when he discusses Authentication without passwords in 20 minutes (THR2002). He has a real talent for compressing complex topics into digestible chunks, which is why he’ll be wowing people in the theaters.
• Brian then talks about Real-world hybrid Active Directory join and compliance in 20 minutes (THR2047) on Wednesday at 12:30PM. Hybrid stuff is such fun, especially when compliance is involved!
• The final leg of Brian’s 20-minute sessions covers the topic of Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection in 20 minutes (THR2046) on Thursday at 12:05PM. Explaining what ATP is normally takes 15 minutes, so I’m not sure how Brian will cover the rest in the remaining five.
• Tony Redmond will report on his testing of the New, fast, and reliable Exchange Online PowerShell cmdlets (THR3003) at 10:55AM on Wednesday. That is, assuming Microsoft announces the new super-secret but actually very interesting cmdlets earlier in the conference. I’m sure that they will.
• At 2:15PM on Thursday, Tony reveals Things you never knew about Microsoft Teams that might be important some day (BRK3142). We turn up all sorts of interesting facts as we research Teams for the book, and this is a chance to share some of those with conference attendees.
• Finally, Tony will talk about his favorite topic in Will Microsoft Teams take over from email? (BRK2090). This session is at 9:15AM on Friday, and the hope is that a few attendees will limp into the conference after the Attendee Party at Universal Studios on Thursday night.

Here’s a link to an interview with Tony that Community Reporter Tom Morgan made to discuss some of the sessions.

Remember that all the sessions at Microsoft Ignite 2019 are recorded and will be available online a day or so after they are delivered. Of course, there’s nothing quite like being in a super-cooled conference room in the Orange County Convention Center. Listening to a recording in the comfort of your own home is no comparison.

At the Booth

In addition to giving sessions, our authors will be around and about. You can expect to meet Paul Robichaux and our esteemed technical editor, Vasil Michev, at the Quadrotech booth. Others will be helping to staff the Microsoft booth to cover technologies like Exchange Online and Teams. Keep a keen eye and you’ll bump into someone.

Office 365 Exposed Podcast

Paul Robichaux and I will tape an episode of our Office 365 Exposed podcast at 10am on Tuesday, November 5 (POD1016). The recording takes place in the Podcast Center close to the technology exhibition. We have a couple of interesting guests lined up to discuss issues like the role of Outlook Mobile in the Office 365 ecosystem and what’s next for SharePoint Online. And of course, we’ll be reviewing the announcements that Microsoft are expected to make on the first day of the conference.

Yet Another Interesting Session List

I’ve posted details of some interesting sessions on Petri.com. We all have our own preferences, but these are the ones that took my attention when I browsed the Microsoft Ignite 2019 session catalog. Another theater session that I’ve found is Unified PowerShell experience for Microsoft Graph – preview (THR3095). The promise of a consistent PowerShell module to access Microsoft Graph data is pretty compelling, so it’s a talk I will definitely attend.

After the Microsoft Ignite 2019 conference finishes at noon on November 8, we’ll head home with a ton of work to do for to update the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook about the news and information we’ve gathered at the conference. Subscribers will benefit from this information in the update issued on December 1. It’s the nice thing about an ever-updating book.

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!

” …Provides immeasurable value well beyond the cover price”

MVP Steve Goodman is the joint editor of the Practical365.com site. He’s also the co–host of the All About 365 podcast with Jason Wynn, another MVP. Historically, Steve’s background is in Exchange, but I know him as an experienced practitioner who covers SharePoint Online, Teams, and Yammer too. It was therefore a delight to sit down with Steve (over a Teams video meeting) to talk about the 2020 edition of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook.

Steve’s review of the book is based on an advance copy September 2019 update now available on Practical365.com. The full September update is now available (including some changes and new information Steve didn’t see) for subscribers to download. Indeed, we even fixed some typos yesterday and refreshed the files just to make sure that what’s online is as good as we can make it.

Teams Video Captured in Stream and Now on YouTube

In addition, Steve edited the video recording of our 28-minute chat (captured by Teams in Stream) and posted it on YouTube.com. You’ll notice that both of us use the blur background feature of Teams to disguise the horribly cluttered nature of our offices (well, mine anyway). Unfortunately, blurring the background does nothing to disguise the effect of the tiredness caused by an overnight transatlantic flight (or age). I guess you can’t have everything!

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?

First Update Covers 21 Chapters

The Office 365 for IT Pros writing team is proud to announce that the August 1 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 21 of the 24 content chapters. The full set of changes are shown in Figure 1 and in our change log.

Continual Change, Continual Updates

Some of the changes within Office 365 in July 2019 underlined the value of the ePublishing model for books covering cloud services. The new OWA is now the default OWA, a retirement date in 2021 has been announced for Skype for Business Online, and Microsoft is changing the control for OWA for access to third-party storage providers. By themselves these are small but important changes. Taken together with all the other changes that we learned about during the month, you begin to realize just why printed books can’t cope with Office 365. This is why we issue a completely fresh updated book every month and it’s why Office 365 for IT Pros is such terrific value for our subscribers. We hope that you agree.

Sixth Edition Packed Full of Office 365 Information

The Office 365 for IT Pros writing team is thrilled to announce the publication of Office 365 for IT Pros (2020 Edition), the sixth in our series of the only continually-updated eBook covering Office 365 architecture, deployment, and management. The main book is a svelte 1,115 pages long and the companion volume adds another 344 pages. Not that we’re boasting, of course.

The files for the new edition are now online on Gumroad.com (PDF/EPUB version) and Amazon (Kindle). We prefer people to buy the PDF/EPUB version for many reasons, including our ability to offer discounted subscriptions to a new edition to existing subscribers. You can convert the EPUB book to MOBI and load that on a Kindle.

Lots of Changes You Might Not Immediately Appreciate

Our attitude to eBooks is that it’s like cloud software – always changing! A casual glance at the 2020 edition might conclude that it simply carries on from where the 2019 edition left off. But under the covers we have:

• Conducted a deep technical review of all the content to find any errors that might have been lurking. Errors creep in overtime as we update the book to describe changes happening inside Office 365. We need to do a housekeeping review annually to chase out all the small but annoying bugs that have crept into the text.
• Our review also updated figures to make sure that they reflect the latest GUI seen inside Office 365. We’re always delighted when Microsoft makes a small change to an interface.
• Likewise, we checked every hyperlink in the book to ensure its accuracy and that it works. Microsoft has a habit of updating hyperlinks that we track but sometimes miss. All fixed now.
• Incorporated new material across many chapters to cover topics like Office 365 Information Barriers.
• Moved some older but still valuable material (like Exchange mailbox retention policies) to the companion volume. We also moved the chapter on Delve to the companion volume. Not because we don’t like Delve, but because we’ve not seen much innovation in the space over the last two years, possibly because Microsoft Search is taking the headlines at present. Moving material to the companion volume keeps the main book at a manageable size and allows us the space to include content about new Office 365 functionality.
• Expanded the Flow chapter to include coverage of PowerApps.
• Created a new chapter for Microsoft Stream to reflect its growing integration with other parts of Office 365 like Forms, SharePoint, and Teams.
• Split the coverage of Teams into two chapters. Chapter 11 covers the basics of working with Teams while management has been moved into Chapter 12. The two chapters amount to around 100 pages, which we think is a fair representation of the importance of Teams to Office 365 right now.

New Author

The 2020 Edition welcomes Brian Desmond to the writing team. Brian is a very experienced MVP who specializes in directories and identities and is the author of “Active Directory: Designing, Deploying, and Running Active Directory.” He has taken over Chapter 3 and will develop this content over the coming year to track the explosion in Azure Active Directory functionality that has a huge influence over Office 365.

How Existing Subscribers Can Upgrade

Subscribers to the 4^th and 5^th (2019) editions, including those who received sponsored copies, will receive email to tell them how to claim their discounted $14.95 renewals to subscribe to the 2020 edition. If you bought the 2019 book and don’t receive a message, please get in contact with us and we’ll sort things out. Files for the 2019 book will remain online to allow people to download the latest updates (11 June 2019). See our FAQ for more information about how to download updates.

People who bought a full-price copy of the 2019 edition in May or June 2019 will receive a note from Quadrotech, who are kindly proving free upgrades to the 2020 edition for these subscribers.

Join Our Happy Band

If you’ve never subscribed to Office 365 for IT Pros, we’d love for you to join us on this journey. Your $49.95 subscription covers the main and companion volumes in both PDF and EPUB formats and includes all updates issued until the 2021 edition appears. We issued 15 updates spanning 164 significant chapter updates for the 2019 edition and plan on doing much the same for the 2020 edition. The book is packed full of practical and insightful information and our readers love it – or so they tell us (and they would never lie, would they?)

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.

Do We Pay Attention to Reader Ratings?

The Office 365 for IT Pros writing team is a pretty pragmatic bunch, and we don’t spend a heap of time checking if the book receives reviews and ratings. Life’s too short and we have other stuff to do, like checking what’s happening inside the sometimes crazy world of Office 365. All of which explains why we totally failed to notice that the book had accumulated a nice number of five-star ratings on Gumroad. com (where we sell the EPUB/PDF version). In fact, we never knew that Gumroad allowed readers to rate books (Gumroad posted a Twitter update on January 31 to say that ratings was the largest feature they had shipped in a while).

We have a page to record comments we’ve received and do see comments posted on our Facebook page when we post messages there, but checking Amazon for reviews and ratings is not a daily priority, especially has the 2019 edition has received just one rating on Amazon.com and another on Amazon.co.uk. This amuses us because the last edition (2018) received 29 reviews! Clearly we’re not doing something right.

Comments

What we do value enormously are comments from readers that help us find problems or identify topics we need to cover. Broken hyperlinks are the bane of our lives, so it’s great (in an odd way) to hear from someone when they find a bad link. Everyone has an idea about what should be in the book and we like hearing about this too, even if we don’t always agree to include extra content (the book’s pretty big already).

If you have a comment, please use the contact form on this site to tell us. Or if you’re more comfortable with Facebook, post the comment there. Either way, we’ll respond. It is really helpful when you tell us the chapter, heading, or page number where the problem exists and what update you’ve found it in. Remember that we update the book monthly, so a problem in the March 2019 update might not exist in the April 2019 update. That’s one good reason to always download updated files after we release them.

This project has only succeeded (so far) thanks to the support we’ve received from the Office 365 community. Keep on sending those comments to us.

EBook Publication

We publish Office 365 for IT Pros in EPUB/PDF and Kindle (MOBI) versions. The first is available from Gumroad.com, the second from Amazon. We use the Caliber ePublishing software to generate the EPUB and MOBI files and generally our ePublishing workflow goes smoothly.

Recently, we received a report that our EPUB file couldn’t be processed by Google Play. In addition to buying books, you can add personal books to your Google Play library and then read them on any device supported by Google Play. The problem was that the file uploaded to Google Play, but any attempt to process the file to add it to your library ended with an error “This file cannot be processed.”

EPUB Generation

Our EPUB files are good. After the files are generated, we check them using the Edge browser (which boasts a surprisingly good reader) and some free EPUB readers (like this one). We therefore have no idea why Google Play would complain about the file.

We’re not the only ones with problems. Google’s own advice includes “If your file is an EPUB, try converting it to a PDF.” This tip is replicated elsewhere, as is converting the EPUB to MOBI and then back again to EPUB using an online file converter. I tried this method and it worked. However, I didn’t check the entire 37 MB EPUB to see if anything had been affected by the multiple trips through file formats.

PDF is a Better Alternative

Google Play supports the upload and reading of PDF files. When you subscribe to the EPUB/PDF version of Office 365 for IT Pros, you can download files in both formats. Our recommendation is that if you want to use Google Play, upload the PDF file. Google Play doesn’t have the same issues it seems to have with the EPUB and the formatting of tables and code examples is better.

In fact, our recommendation for anyone interested in Office 365 for IT Pros is to use the PDF whenever possible as it will always be the best reading experience.

Hard Deletes for Office 365 Purges

As is often the case when you write for a moving target, I learned that Microsoft had upgraded the compliance search purge action to finally support hard deletes the day after we shipped the March 2019 update for Office 365 for IT Pros. The book is updated, but the topic is worth highlighting here.

Compliance Search Actions

Actions govern what happens when you run a content search. Normally, after creating a search, you execute an action to execute a preview search, followed by an export action when the search returns the set of items you need. Behind the scenes, the New-ComplianceSearch cmdlet sets up a search and the New-ComplianceSearchAction cmdlet associates an action with the search. The Start-ComplianceSearch cmdlet then starts the search.

Compliance Search Purge Actions for Exchange Online Only

The compliance search purge action is only supported for content searches executed against Exchange Online mailboxes. The Purge action is also only accessible to users who hold the Organization Management role for the compliance center. Up to recently, it was only possible to soft-delete mailbox items, which means that a user could recover the item. This is OK if you want to allow users to recover items deleted in error, but not if you want to permanently remove items like malware or messages sent in error. The Search-Mailbox cmdlet gets a lot of use in these scenarios because it is very good at removing mailbox items.

Microsoft didn’t say anything about upgrading the purge action to support hard deletes, and I only noticed the change when I looked at the documentation for New-ComplianceSearchAction for quite another reason. It’s nice how these unannounced changes pop up in the cloud, I guess.

In any case, if you use a hard delete purge action, Exchange Online moves the items into the Recoverable Items\Purges folder and marks them for permanent removal. The next time the Managed Folder Assistant processes the mailbox, it removes the items from the database and they are irrecoverable. While the items are in the Purges folder, they are invisible to the user.

Limited Purging

You can only create a purge action for a search with PowerShell. However, that’s not the big downside. Only ten items per mailbox can be purged in this manner. The limit is tied to the content search results, so if you wanted to remove 50 items from a mailbox, you’ll have to run five separate search and remove cycles to be sure that everything is found and deleted. By comparison, Search-Mailbox can process up to 10,000 items.

Microsoft is keen to emphasize that content search actions are not designed to perform mailbox clear-outs. Having a low limit per mailbox restricts the potential impact of administrator mistakes in the search query. It also forces administrators to construct search queries that are narrow rather than broad. In other words, you should use a search query that precisely identifies the exact message you want to remove rather than a query that casts a wide net and finds lots of items, including some that you don’t want to remove.

Compliance search actions by definition depend on being able to find indexed items. Unindexed items cannot be purged.

Hard delete purging (permanent removal) can’t be effective when litigation holds or in-place holds exist on a mailbox. If you want to permanently expunge all details of items from mailboxes, make sure that you remove any holds from the mailbox before starting. Soft delete purging (which allows users to recover deleted items) accommodates holds.

Using a Compliance Search Purge Action

First, create a content search with PowerShell or through the Microsoft Purview Compliance portal (the easiest approach). Make sure that the search finds the items that you want to remove and limit it to Exchange Online mailboxes. Now add the purge action by running the New-ComplianceSearchAction cmdlet to add the purge action and set the purge type to HardDelete:

New-ComplianceSearchAction -Purge -PurgeType HardDelete -SearchName "Search for Documents"

Confirm
Are you sure you want to perform this action?
This operation will make message items meeting the criteria of the compliance search "ACDSearch" completely
inaccessible to users. There is no automatic method to undo the removal of these message items.
[Y] Yes  [A] Yes to All  [N] No  [L] No to All  [?] Help (default is "Y"): y

Exchange Online notices that a purge action is specified and goes ahead to find the matching items using the query specified for the compliance search. It then purges the first 10 matching items found. The search should not take long (it’s only going to process 10 items), but you can check by running the Get-ComplianceSearchAction cmdlet. Note that the name of the action is formed by the search name, an underscore, and the name of the associated search. When the status is reported as Complete, the items are purged.

Get-ComplianceSearchAction -Identity "Search for documents_purge" | Format-Table Searchname, JobStartTime, JobProgress, Status

SearchName           JobStartTime         JobProgress Status
----------           ------------         ----------- ------
Search for Documents 15 Mar 2019 18:18:48         100 Completed

To check the effect of a purge, you can look at the folders in a user mailbox that you know held a message found by the search. Here we use the Get-ExoMailboxFolderStatistics cmdlet to retrieve the item count for the Purges folder. As items are purged, the item count in this folder should increase.

Get-ExoMailboxFolderStatistics -Identity Kim.Akers  -FolderScope RecoverableItems |?{$_.Name -eq "Purges"}| Format-Table Name, ItemsInFolder

Name      ItemsInFolder
----      -------------
Purges              701

We’ve published a script in our GitHub repository to show how to use a compliance search purge action to remove items from Exchange Online mailboxes. Hopefully, it will help you understand and implement the technique.

For more information about content searches, see Chapter 20 of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. The Search-Mailbox cmdlet is covered in Chapter 6.

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.

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.

Sloppy Journalism in Microsoft 365 Coverage

I have long criticized the coverage of web sites, blogs, and other outlets that take press releases from technology companies like Microsoft and recycle the content. A good example of how this happens is the January 2, 2019 release covering advanced security and compliance options for Microsoft 365. In truth, there’s not much news here unless you consider repackaging of existing technologies into new ways for Microsoft to extract monthly fees to be news.

Nonetheless, the release was picked up and repeated by a wide range of outlets (Microsoft’s PR is very effective). The laughable thing is that the majority of the repeats were very lazy and didn’t bother to correct the howling mistake (see “Advance Compliance” above). As easily found with a simple web search, among those who recycled Microsoft’s text included well-regarded technology sites like windowscentral.com and neowin.net.

Too Little Time

The problem is compounded by the seeming unwillingness or inability of blog authors to revisit and correct content after it is posted. Although it is impossible to retract a printed error in the world of newspapers and books, the same is not true for electronic media. The inability to patch printed copy is one of the motivating factors that drove the decision to make Office 365 for IT Pros a purely electronic publication.

We update Office 365 for IT Pros monthly in an ongoing drive to eliminate inaccuracies and increase the value of the information in the book. We still make mistakes, but at least we can fix the mistakes and make the accurate content available to our readers. A glance at our change log tells a story.

Of course, the problem is that the pursuit of accuracy requires time. Authors have time to write the original text, pass over the text in a cursory edit, and post it. They don’t have the same time (or perhaps interest) to review in the light of new developments, like when Microsoft updates something in Office 365 or fixes a bug. A click and page access is worth the same whether the page holds out-of-date or erroneous content or is accurate. The net result, as I discussed at an Ignite 2018 session, is that too many blogs are like dead fish – their content begins to smell three days after posting.

Too Much Information to Handle

In one respect, we should expect the kind of coverage we see, even in reputable sites. Technology companies like Microsoft pump a continuous selection of news to journalists in the hope of getting coverage. Looming deadlines and the need to keep sites populated with new material mean that those who receive the press releases often don’t have the time or the technical background to understand the difference between terms like Office 365 Advance Compliance and Office 365 Advanced Compliance. The upshot is a lot of very flawed reports.

The example I’ve cited above isn’t very important. Anyone can make a mistake in a press release and Microsoft has since corrected the online version of their text. However, the same thing happens in technology blogs, where authors take flawed content and recycle it without ever asking themselves whether something is right. It’s sad, but that’s the way people work at the speed of the cloud. Information is shared faster than ever before, and so are mistakes

The Office 365 for IT Pros writing team makes mistakes all the time. But we do our best to correct any errors as quickly as we find them. If you find something that’s not quite right, let us know by posting a comment here. We’ll figure out what’s gone wrong and correct it for the next release of the book.

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.

Slice and Dice the Roadmap

As reported earlier this week, Microsoft has merged the Office 365 Roadmap into a new Microsoft 365 Roadmap. The ability to filter roadmap items via feature (like Outlook) or service (like SharePoint Online) has always been in the roadmap, but it’s even more useful to use the Download button to write the filtered items (or the entire roadmap) to a CSV file that can be analyzed using Excel or imported into Power BI. This was supported for Office 365 in the past, now you can include Windows 10 and Enterprise Mobility & Security roadmap items.

The downloaded file is named Microsoft365RoadMap_Features_date.csv.

Each line in the file holds the information about a single roadmap item. The following fields are included:

• Id: A five-digit identifier for the roadmap item.
• Title: Headline descriptor for the item. For example, “SharePoint mobile: organizational news support.”
• Description: Notes about what the roadmap item involves. For example, “As you tap into the SharePoint mobile app News tab, you’ll now see support for organizational news – which brings more greater control, process and reach to how news can be published throughout your organization.”
• Status: The current deployment status for the roadmap item. This will be “Launched” or “In development” or “Rolling out.”
• MoreInfoLink: If available, the URL to a page containing extra information about the roadmap item.
• Tags: One or more tags to identify the parts of Microsoft 365 that the roadmap item belongs to. For example, “O365, SharePoint” or “Exchange.”
• Added Date: The date that Microsoft originally added the item to the roadmap.  The date is in U.S. format, so 8/29/2018 is 29 August 2018.
• Last Modified: The date that Microsoft last updated the item.
• PublicDisclosureAvailabilityDate: The time frame that Microsoft expects the roadmap item to be available to customers. This might be as specific as a month or use a longer period, such as Q4 CY2018 (fourth quarter of calendar year 2018).

Microsoft intends that customers can use the information in the download file to help plan for the introduction of Microsoft 365 features into their tenant. Given the number of changes that happen within Office 365 and the other Microsoft 365 components, it’s a worthwhile advice.

Head over to the Microsoft 365 roadmap, download items, and start analyzing…

We cover the topic of keeping up to date with Microsoft 365 in Chapter 1 of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. But keeping up to date is what we’re all about, so the entire book reflects our best effort at documenting what’s current inside Office 365. We hope that you like that.

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).

Talking PowerShell at Ignite

Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking at the Microsoft Ignite conference about how to use PowerShell to get real stuff done with Office 365. The session was in one of the twelve theaters dotted around the exhibition floor and attracted a good number, as evident from Jeff Guillet’s photo (above).

My premise is that anyone who wants to run an Office 365 tenant should know PowerShell. This doesn’t mean that you should be a professional programmer (I’m not at this point in my career). It does mean that you should know how to stitch together cmdlets to solve problems, possibly using code snippets found on the web (and tested thoroughly) as a base.

I covered four examples and told everyone in the audience that they could find the code online in Petri.com. Here’s a list of those articles.

• Using information in the Office 365 Audit Log.
• Using Teams compliance records to find out if a team is being used.
• Using PowerShell to control Office 365 licenses.
• Checking email addresses against the Pwned service.

Naturally, if you look in the Office 365 for IT Pros ebook, you’ll find hundreds of other PowerShell examples.

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.

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.

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.

One of the most common questions we get is why we generate a new edition every year.

The answer is pretty simple. It’s reflects the pace of the cloud and the need for books to change to cover what’s happening inside Office 365.

The Old Days of On-Premises Software

In the “old days” of on-premises software, we would have a new major version of products like Exchange and SharePoint every three years. People like me would cover the new version in a new book, like my Exchange series – I wrote about Exchange 4.0, 5.0, 5.5, 2000, 2003, 2007, 2010, and 2013 before I moved to coverage of online services.

People seemed quite happy to buy a new book every three years, and the content of a book covering a new version of Exchange built on the previous version (just like the software). I added new text to cover the new features, removed text that no longer applied, and edited text that needed to be changed to apply to the new version.

Even with a 3-year software product cycle, the traditional approach to writing technical books couldn’t keep pace with changes and updates, and we invariably published a book that was in some way obsolete as soon as it appeared on the shelves. It was only a little obsolete because software didn’t change all that quickly, but it was obsolete in parts and became more obsolete as Microsoft rolled out service packs (in the old, old days) and later cumulative updates.

A New Edition of Office 365 for IT Pros Every Year

Now we build and publish a new edition of the Office 365 for IT Pros book every year. The new edition allows us to add new text, remove old stuff that no longer applies or isn’t as important as it once was, and update text to reflect what’s happening inside Office 365. That sounds a lot like it was in the traditional publishing model for on-premises software products. The difference is that things happen a lot faster – and when we publish a new edition, we know it’s up to date, and we can keep it up to date with frequent updates.

We Take Care of our Subscribers

So when people ask me why they should pay $49.95 for a new edition of Office 365 for IT Pros, my response is that if they bought the previous edition, they’ll get the new edition for a much reduced price because we offer subscribers a substantial discount. And if they are only buying the book for the first time now, we’ll take care of them with discounts to renew in the future. None of that happened with the traditional model.

I think the new approach we’re taking works well for everyone. Feel free to disagree! But buy a copy of the book anyway…