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Happy New Year to Office 365 for IT Pros Readers
Starting off the new year with a bang, the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook team is delighted to announce the availability of the January 2026 update for Office 365 for IT Pros (2026 edition). This is monthly update #127. An update (#19.1) has already been issued for the Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell eBook, which is available both separately and as part of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook bundle.
Current subscribers can download the updated PDF and EPUB files through their Gumroad.com account or using the link in the receipt emailed after purchase. The link always accesses the latest book files. Further details of how to access book updates are available in our FAQ. Details of the changes in update #127 are in our change log.
Keeping the Book Relevant
We’re now halfway through the 2026 edition and thoughts turn to the shape of the next edition. As long-term readers know, we have evolved the book contents continuously over the years to reflect the current shape of first Office 365 and now Microsoft 365. At the start, we spent a lot of time on migration and synchronization because those were major needs at the time. Even though Microsoft has recently decided to enter the tenant-to-tenant space, migration isn’t as important as it once was, which is why it’s not a topic we cover now.
Along the same lines, the introduction of Teams in 2017 and the growing importance of Power Platform (now evolving towards agents and agentic processing) meant that these topics joined the fundamentals of Entra ID, Exchange Online, and SharePoint Online. We’ve also covered the evolution of video processing from the first Office 365 Video system to Stream to Clipchamp and tracked the changes in compliance technology from workload-dependent eDiscovery and retention processing to Microsoft Purview solutions. Finally, we took most of the PowerShell content from the book to form a separate PowerShell book focused mostly on how to work with the Microsoft Graph. That book now offers four times as much PowerShell content as we could fit into the main book.
All in all, it’s been a compelling and worthwhile challenge to keep the book relevant to the needs of tenant administrators. The trick is to continue this for the future.
What We Don’t Do
Before discussing what we might do with the book in the future, it’s important to set out some ground rules. Readers might have noticed that we do not cover some parts of Microsoft 365 and ask why this is the case. Well, our focus has always been on covering the basics because if administrators master the details of Entra ID, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Teams, there’s a fair chance that their tenants will be secure and robust. Add in the basics of Purview compliance in retention, data loss prevention, information protection, and eDiscovery, and the tenant is highly functional.
We purposefully do not go near the Viva Suite. Since its introduction, Microsoft has killed two of the original Viva solutions (Viva Goals and Viva Topics) and it doesn’t seem to make much sense to devote much attention to solutions that are of minor interest to the overall Microsoft 365 community. The same is true for Purview extensions covering Microsoft Fabric: invaluable technology for those who need it but uninteresting to the wider community.
Covering Copilot
But things are changing. Artificial Intelligence has become part of everyday life. We all know the focus Microsoft has on the introduction of Copilot functionality across as many parts of Microsoft 365 as they can reach. So far, we have covered Microsoft 365 Copilot and agent technology at a level that we think is appropriate. The danger of devoting large swathes of the book to Copilot is that the content is interesting only if a tenant has Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses. The evidence to date is that those with licenses are not a high percentage of the Microsoft 365 user base.
One option is to continue on the current path. Another option is to create a chapter to bring together all aspects of AI for Microsoft 365. A third is to create a separate eBook covering AI and Power Platform like we did for PowerShell. We don’t have a good answer right now and will wait to see how the vision for Agent 365 and other components presented by Microsoft at the recent Ignite conference develop in reality.
On to Update #128
Planning for the next release will continue over the next few months alongside the monthly updates for the 2026 edition. There’s no rest as the flood of updates for Microsoft 365 ecosystem continues to flow.