Office 365 for IT Pros February 2024 Update

Monthly Update #104 Available for Download

The Office 365 for IT Pros team is delighted to announce the availability of the February 2024 update (monthly update #104) for the Office 365 for IT Pros (2024 edition) eBook. We urge subscribers to download the updated files from your Gumroad.com account or by using the link to the files included in the receipt emailed to you upon purchase.

Details of the changes in update #104 are available in our change log. Please consult our FAQ for more information about how to download the updated files.

Busy January

A new year brings new developments and new challenges. Possibly the biggest update in January 2024 occurred when Microsoft removed the limitations on Copilot for Microsoft 365 purchases to allow tenants with Office 365 E3 and E5 licenses to consider Copilot deployments at a much lower cost. The Copilot Pro license also arrived to serve personal consumers.

It’s likely that the pace of Copilot trials will now accelerate as people try out the AI assistant to see if it makes sense in their environment. Our experience so far is that Copilot is great at some things (like summarizing Teams meetings) and less impressive in other areas (like text generation). A solid test using your own information will tell you if it makes sense to proceed with a mass roll-out of expensive licenses. We’ll support this activity by gradually increasing the amount of Copilot-related content in the book, especially information about managing Copilot.

Another big story during January was Microsoft’s admission that the Midnight Blizzard nation state attackers managed to penetrate their production Microsoft 365 tenant and exfiltrate email from some corporate email accounts, including members of its senior leadership. The route in was a password spray to compromise an account in a test tenant followed by use of a malicious OAuth app.

The episode proved once again that enabling MFA for all accounts should be the norm (and here’s a script to help you report MFA enablement and use). The app permissions report script we published afterward might help your tenant avoid a similar attack.

More positively, Microsoft announced that Office 365 now has more than 400 million paid seats when they revealed their FY24 Q2 results. Even after 13 years, Office 365 user numbers keep on growing at around 2.5 million seats monthly.

New and Deprecated Functionality

New functionality continues to flow and it’s important that tenants keep a close eye on the announcements Microsoft makes in the Microsoft 365 admin center message center. A flood of updates appeared during January, including the ability to share contact information during Teams chats. I think this feature will be popular. Unsurprisingly given the retirement of the classic Teams client at the end of March 2024, it’s noticeable that new Teams features tend to be available only for the new client.

Other old functionality that’s due for retirement soon include the Azure AD and Microsoft Online Services (MSOL) PowerShell modules. Apart from the cmdlets that deal with license management (already obsolete and non-functional), the other cmdlets in these modules will continue working after March 31, 2024, but Microsoft won’t provide support if customers experience problems using the cmdlets. If you haven’t done so already, it’s time to embrace the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK and convert scripts to use SDK cmdlets. Chapter 23 of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook is packed with examples of how to use the SDK cmdlets and we add more each month.

Microsoft’s latest attempt to retire the Search-Mailbox cmdlet seems to be more serious than before. I never mind seeing old technology retiring if it is replaced by better technology, but that’s not what’s happening here. The purported replacement (compliance search purge actions) might have some advantages in larger tenants as the number of mailboxes to remove items from scale up, but gaps still exist between what you can do with Search-Mailbox and what’s possible with compliance search actions.

Update #105 Starting Up

No sooner than we finish one update than we start on the next. February 2024 is a 29-day month, so we’ve an extra day of updates to process. What fun! Stay tuned for update #105 coming on March 1, 2024.