88th 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 88th 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.