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Files for Monthly Update #131 are Available for Download
The Office 365 for IT Pros team is delighted to announce that monthly update #131 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 #131 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. Our FAQ explains how the update process works.
Apart from the updated EPUB and PDF files for the “big book,” the Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell eBook is now at version 23, and updated PDF and EPUB files for this eBook are also available for current Office 365 for IT Pros subscribers to download.
Modernized Change Management
MC1282306 (16 April) covers the important topic of how Microsoft makes new features available to customers in what Microsoft calls Modernized Change Management. The current system of publishing message center posts has been around for several years and isn’t as good as it could be. Some posts are terrible in terms of communicating what’s about to happen and why it might be important to tenants. Some have misleading or just bad titles. And in many cases, tenant administrators don’t read message center posts, a fact that becomes very obvious each time Microsoft attempts to remove a protocol from Microsoft 365 (the current campaign to remove Exchange Web Services is a case in point).
The new methodology includes an MCP server to query about updates, enhanced message center updates (maybe even better written and checked for fluency, accuracy, and understandability), and support for the “frontier” tier, for tenants who want earlier access to features than is available through targeted availability today. Microsoft is starting with Microsoft 365 Copilot (Figure 1) before rolling out to other workloads.
Microsoft shares a great deal of important and useful information through message center posts. Anything to help that information become more accessible is welcome. However, it takes two to tango, so remember to read message center posts regularly to find out what’s coming for your tenant.
Updates Coming your Way
Speaking of updates, some interesting changes are on their way in the short term. Small changes (on the grand scheme of things) often have a big impact. Being able to test the chosen microphone and speaker before joining a Teams meeting (MC1288530, available in mid-May) is firmly in that category. It might even eliminate some support calls.
Flagged in February 2026, being able to change the organizer of a meeting via an Exchange Online PowerShell cmdlet (MC1227623, mid-May) is something that should have been around a long time ago. Microsoft delicately says that the feature is needed “when a meeting owner changes roles, goes on leave, or is offboarded.” Offboarding is the nice way to say that someone has been fired or laid off. The post also says that UX is coming to Outlook classic. OWA, the new Outlook, and Teams to allow users to initiate transfers. In these circumstances, the new organizer must accept the meeting before the transfer completes.
Small to medium tenants (with Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Microsoft 365 Business Standard, or Microsoft 365 Business Premium licenses) can add a Live chat feature to their web site. The feature allows customers to interact with tenant members via Teams, with transcripts of conversations being stored in a central team. Sounds good, but it’s not for enterprise tenants, even after the name change to Customer Connect (MC1287369).
According to MC1246031, tenants with Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses will soon be able to access messages in shared mailboxes (or folders delegated from user mailboxes) in Copilot Chat (BizChat). Basically, Copilot uses the delegate permissions of the signed-in user to access the shared content. Shared mailboxes continue to get lots of use, something that caused us to write about how to extract KPIs for responses from messages sent to shared mailboxes. Of course, if shared mailboxes receive external email, the disabled accounts used for those mailboxes might need to be licensed for Microsoft Defender for Office 365.
MC1288530 is a strong candidate for the most important message center post in April. It covers the news that Recently used Teams emojis (including the all-so-important custom emojis) sync across devices from mid-May 2026.
Disappointingly, Planner tab support for Teams Shared and Private Channels (MC1262590) is delayed until late July 2026. I’m really looking forward to this feature.
The selected six message center posts gives an idea of the kind of change that happens inside Microsoft 365. Will your tenant be ready to embrace modernized change management?
On to Office 365 for IT Pros Monthly Update #132
The June 2026 update will be the last for Office 365 for IT Pros (2026 edition). We will move to the 2027 edition in July 2026 and begin another yearly cycle of updates. Time flies when you’re having fun, or so they say. We must be having fun keeping up to date with the changes published by Microsoft… or slightly mad.