Office 365 for IT Pros August 2023 Update Available

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!