Office 365 for IT Pros May 2023 Update Available

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,