Monthly Update 87 for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook

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!