Office 365 for IT Pros January 2024 Update

Monthly Update #103 Now Available for Download

The Office 365 for IT Pros team is delighted to welcome the new year with the 103^rd monthly update for the Office 365 for IT Pros (2024 edition eBook. The updated files are now available for subscribers to download from Gumroad.com (the EPUB/PDF version) or Amazon. The book’s change log contains outline details of the major updates applied during December. More information about fetching updates is available in the FAQ.

December Articles on Office 365 for IT Pros Blog

Despite the shortness of the working month, December 2023 saw the team investigate different topics in Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Entra ID, Microsoft Purview, and Microsoft 365 Copilot. Amongst the articles published were the following selection:

• Exclude Breakglass Accounts from Conditional Access Policies with PowerShell
• How the Auto-label Retention Label Policy for Cloudy Attachments Works
• Entra ID Captures Timestamp for Last Successful Sign In for User Accounts
• Blocking the Welcome Message for Microsoft 365 Groups
• Reporting Entra ID Admin Consent Requests (for OAuth Apps)
• Creating a Hold Report for Microsoft Purview eDiscovery Cases
• Using Microsoft 365 Copilot for Word
• Exchange Online Retention Policies and the Deleted Items Folder

Just because we publish an article about a topic doesn’t mean that the information turns up in the book. Something that we discover when researching a theme might only warrant a brief mention in a paragraph. Others end up as complete sections that we develop over time.

In other words, there’s no direct correlation between an article showing up on Office365itpros.com and the eBook content. The aim here is to share information about interesting aspects of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem as we discover facts and insights. If we included everything in the book, we’d end up with a 2,500-page monster. 1,350 pages is quite enough.

Office 365 for IT Pros: 2023 in Review

My full review of the Microsoft 365 year for 2023 is available on Practical365.com. In a nutshell, Microsoft’s marketing energies focus on Copilot for Microsoft 365 while their sales efforts look to increase the amount of licensing revenues they can extract from customers. There’s nothing wrong with a commercial company seeking to make money from an installed base; it’s just a pity that everything becomes quite so intense around one area, especially when the cost of acquiring and using Copilot for Microsoft 365 is probably higher than most tenants can afford. Hopefully the price will decline (or inflation will catch up) to bring AI-based assistance within the reach of all those who want it.

Many good things happened across Microsoft 365 during 2023 including better security for email (but too much spam still gets through, including obvious phishing attempts), the availability of the Teams 2.1 client (the sole client from March 31, 2024), and many Entra ID enhancements in an ongoing effort to secure connections. The number of apps in the Teams app store is 2,282 and growing, even if some of the apps need to be updated for the new client. There’s no doubt that Teams is a very popular app platform.

SharePoint Online is on a roll with initiatives like SharePoint Premium and SharePoint Embedded due to be revealed more broadly in 2024. During the year we’ll also be able to assess the true impact of the Microsoft 365 Backup offering, promised for delivery by the end of 2023 but still not in my tenant as I write this on December 31. I guess a few hours remain for the product to show up.

Time Passes By

Although we will see new products in 2024, one thing that won’t change is the need to keep on top of change. Our purpose and intent is to help our subscribers master change within Microsoft 365. On to monthly update #104!