Table of Contents
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- Checked screen shots to discover ones which are now outdated and to remove a few which we don’t think add much value.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.