February 2026 Update for Office 365 for IT Pros

Update #128 Available for Download

The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook team is delighted to announce the availability of the February 2026 update for Office 365 for IT Pros (2026 edition). This is monthly update #128. An update (#20.2) 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 #128 are in our change log.

The Copilot Conundrum

Last month we discussed some of the options we’re considering when it comes to covering Microsoft 365 Copilot, Agent 365, and the various types of agents that Microsoft has put such a bet on. In Microsoft’s FY26 Q2 results, we learned that Microsoft 365 Copilot has just 15 million paid seats, or approximately 3.33% of the “over 450 million” paid Microsoft 365 commercial seats.

At list prices, those 15 million seats represent $5.4 billion revenues, but given the usual discounts available to the large enterprises (like Accenture) that are the early adopters for Microsoft 365 Copilot, it’s very unlikely that the actual income comes close to the list price. Either way, Copilot income is a long way from offsetting Microsoft’s capital expenditure on datacenters to host AI services.

Anyway, we’ll continue to cover the management of Copilot within Microsoft 365 tenants at a level that makes sense to us. We won’t go overboard, but we won’t leave our readers without the knowledge to deploy and maintain Copilot.

Unified Tenant Configuration Management

Another recent development is the preview for Unified Tenant Configuration Management (UTCM). This is a similar solution to Desired State Configuration (DSC) for Windows that’s built with different technology to manage many (bit not all) of the essential configuration settings found in Microsoft 365 tenants, like Entra ID, Exchange Online, Defender, and Teams.

As a preview, UTCM is an incomplete solution. It is comprised of a set of Microsoft Graph APIs, has no UX, and some functionality is missing. UTCM also doesn’t deal with SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business at all, an important gap that’s partially explained by the lack of Graph support in these workloads.

I think UTCM will be popular with Microsoft 365 enterprise tenants and with Cloud Service Providers that manage multiple smaller tenants. There are thousands of settings spread across the Microsoft 365 workloads, and keeping track on changes made to the more critical settings is very difficult. UTCM takes on this challenge by monitoring changes against baseline snapshots to report configuration drift (variations against the baseline). It will be interesting to see how this solution evolves and it’s definitely something that we will keep a close eye on over the coming months.

On to Update #129

The nice thing about working on a book that’s republished monthly is that we are never unable to respond to the changing world of technology. We might need some time to think things through and make our minds up about the worth of a new development, but we’ll incorporate important news and information in a monthly update when we consider it appropriate.

On we go to update #129, due on March 1. Microsoft doesn’t stop issuing updates for Microsoft 365, and we don’t stop analyzing, questioning, and reporting on what they do.