Office 365 for IT Pros Update for April 2026

Office 365 for IT Pros Covers a Lot of Exchange History

On March 23, Microsoft celebrated the 30^th anniversary of Exchange Server. Paul Robichaux more than adequately captured his attachment to Exchange and what the product meant to his career in a LinkedIn post. After writing eleven (print) books charting the development of Exchange Server from V4.0 to Exchange 2013, I share many of Paul’s sentiments. Exchange certainly affected my career in a very positive way, and I’ve enjoyed the technical challenges met along the way. The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook started in 2014 (first edition in May 2015) as the Office 365 for Exchange Professionals eBook with the intention of helping people move from the on-premises server into the cloud.

I previously mentioned the Exchange 30^th anniversary along with the more-hyped 25^th anniversary of SharePoint in this post. SharePoint gets much more marketing attention from Microsoft than Exchange does today, but the simple fact is that both workloads are essential to Microsoft 365 tenants. I suspect there aren’t many tenants that don’t send email or store documents.

Office 365 for IT Pros Update #130

We moved focus from Exchange Online a long time ago to encompass the entire Microsoft 365 ecosystem. The book still includes two major chapters covering the operation of Exchange Online and the transport system alongside the chapters on Entra ID, SharePoint Online, Teams, and the Purview solutions, all revised monthly to keep pace with change.

Speaking of updates, monthly update #130 for Office 365 for IT Pros (2026 edition) is now available for download by current subscribers from Gumroad.com using their account or the link in their receipt. Update #130 contains the usual mixture of information about new features and additional insight about existing features. More details about the updates for individual chapters can be found in our change log.

Apart from the updated EPUB and PDF files for the “big book,” the Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell eBook is now at version 22.2 and updated PDF and EPUB files for this eBook are also available for download.

A Gathering of MVPs

March 23 was the first day of the annual Microsoft MVP Summit at the Redmond campus and it provided an opportunity for those who have worked with Exchange over the years to come together to celebrate. Figure 1 is a picture of some of those fine individuals, some of whom are wearing a special commemorative t-shirt designed by long-time Exchange MVP Jeff Guillet.

Earlier on March 23, Microsoft 365 MVPs and Microsoft personnel gathered at the Hilton Garden Inn in Redmond to toast the 30^th anniversary. Vanessa Feliberti Bautista, Microsoft Corporate Vice President responsible for Exchange messaging within Microsoft 365 led the toast, and I was delighted to share some memories of Exchange over the years with her (Figure 2). Vanessa is one of the relatively unknown figures behind the successful delivery of a robust Exchange Online email service for hundreds of millions of people in Microsoft 365 and the Outlook.com consumer email service.

It was also great to chat with newly-anointed Microsoft EVP Perry Clarke at the event. Perry’s promotion is rich reward for the many technical contributions he has made over the years, Looking back on memories of what Perry talked about at the Microsoft Exchange conferences in 2012 and 2014, you can understand the impact of the work being done at the time on what we have today. Perry also wrote the foreword for the original Office 365 for IT Professionals eBook in 2015. Old connections are often the best connections.

Heading to Exchange Server at 40

According to Microsoft’s product lifecycle policy, Exchange Server SE has an “earliest possible end of service date” of December 31, 2035. It looks very much like an Exchange 40^th anniversary will be celebrated. Whether I’ll be still commenting on Exchange and join the festivities is another matter. We’ll just have to wait and see. In the meantime, on to the May 2026 update.