Office 365 for IT Pros December 2025 Update

Monthly Update #126 Now Available for Download

The Office 365 for IT Pros team is happy to announce the availability of the December 2025 update for the Office 365 for IT Pros (2026 edition) eBook. This is the 126^th monthly update. We’ve also published an update for the Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell eBook (now at version 18.1).

Subscribers can download the updated PDF and EPUB files from Gumroad.com. The link in the receipt you received always fetches the latest files. See our FAQ for more information about downloading updated, and our change log for details of what’s changed in update #125.

The Agent Age Unfolds

In November, I had the opportunity to attend the Microsoft Ignite conference in San Francisco. Much as I like San Francisco, I was unimpressed by Ignite 2025. Much to my amazement, Microsoft announced that the 2026 Ignite event will also be in San Francisco, when I suspect that the conference will be dominated again by AI, Copilot, and Agents.

One of the big Microsoft announcements at Ignite 2025 was Agent 365, the new “control plane” for agents. It would be a grave mistake to imagine that Agent 365 is the universal panacea for agent management. Like most Microsoft management initiatives, Agent 365 is likely to be full of holes and incomplete. At least, ISVs hope that this truth will endure because that’s how they make their money. Just look at the market that’s sprung up in the last two years around Entra ID app management.

Agent 365 has legitimized the topic of agent management within Microsoft 365 tenants. At this point, it seems likely that most if not all tenants will have some element of agent activity within a few short years. However, it’s not clear what the scope of the agents will be, who will build them, what management is required to ensure that agents are secure, compliant, and protected against attack.

Possibly even more important, no one knows how much AI and agent processing will cost. The Microsoft 365 Copilot license is expensive, but at this point it’s the simplest and easiest way to manage AI licensing because of what the Copilot license includes. If Microsoft doesn’t simplify and clarify how they will charge customers for agent processing, pay as you go agent licensing, consumption, measurement, and reporting is likely going to be a core skill for tenant administrators to acquire in the future.

It will be interesting to see how the Agent 365 control system evolves over the coming years to deal with these and other challenges. It will be even more interesting to observe what gaps ISVs find in Agent 365 to exploit and complement with what I expect to be a host of agent management solutions.

Agent Management and the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook

In the meantime, the Office 365 for IT Pros team is thinking about how to incorporate agent management into the book. Our book is all about excellence in Microsoft 365 tenant administration with special focus on core workloads like Entra ID, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Teams. I suspect that the line we will take will focus on core agent management (like the Agent 365 section of the Microsoft 365 admin center) and how to automate administrative tasks with agents. Expanding past these boundaries would require a separate book. Maybe we’ll do that too, but that’s another day’s work.

One thing’s for sure. We have many announcements but much of what’s been announced remains to be exposed in public. When that happens, we’ll start to build content. Expect to see the results of that work in the 2027 edition.

On to Update #127

But we have more pressing matters on our plate, like continuing to roll out the monthly updates for the 2026 edition. Even though not much happens in Microsoft in December, we’ll product update #127 in early January 2026. The fun continues!