Testing Microsoft 365 scenarios often involves test data. If the data is stale or always the same, it might not generate good results or help to identify lurking problems. The M365Mutator app helps to solve the problem by mixing things up in your test data. The app can change properties of Entra ID accounts, send email, update calendars, and generally make sure that whatever you’re testing has fresh information to run against.
The Outlook calendar agent seemed to be the answer to the difficulties that I sometimes encounter when trying to sort out my schedule. Alas, the agent failed to deliver when it was given guidelines about how I wanted to create appointments. The overall experience makes me consider whether the huge investment Microsoft is making to infuse AI into its products sometimes turns out duds. Like an agent that can’t schedule.
18 months after the product became generally available, Microsoft 365 Backup has delivered granular restore for SharePoint Online and OneDrive sites. It’s the kind of feature that most tenant administrators might have assumed is already in the program, but at least it now is. The next step is apparently the ability to restore files in place. That isn’t available yet.
Microsoft plans to introduce flex routing to handle situations when demand exceeds capacity for Copilot processing in Europe. This could be an issue for Microsoft 365 tenants in the European Union or European Free Trade Association who want to be sure that their data is processed in Microsoft local datacenters and not sent to the U.S. or Australia when available capacity cannot meet the demand for “large language model inferencing”.
Microsoft disclosed that Entra ID login events were missing from Microsoft Defender for Cloud Applications for nine months — and waited more than three months after the fix to tell customers. Here’s why that matters and what you should do about it.
Microsoft 365 E7 bundles Microsoft 365 E5, Microsoft 365 Copilot, the Entra Suite, and the new Agent 365 into a $99/user/month SKU. The big question is whether investing in Microsoft 365 E7 licenses make sense for tenants? Buying a big batch of licenses will simply throw money away unless those licenses can be used. Paul Robichaux debates the issues and suggests some advice about how to assess the need for E7.
Monthly update #115 is now available for download by subscribers to the Office 365 for IT Pros (2025 edition) eBook. The files available to subscribers also include an update for the Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell eBook. Those who bought the PowerShell book without buying the Office 365 for IT Pros bundle can also download the update.
The 2021 edition of the Office 365 for IT Pros ebook will soon be available. Read about an author’s perspective on working on the book and why it’s different to other books.
The Plenom Busylight is a small LED light that plugs into a USB port on your computer and changes color to reflect your presence status in Teams, Skype, Zoom, Jabber, or several other UC clients. It’s well worth the price to signal when you’re busy to people whom you share your home with.
Grrr. It’s been that kind of day. While chasing a Teams bug (about which more another time, once I have a consistent repro case), I needed to log on to Skype Online PowerShell. We use the Azure baseline policy that forces MFA for all admin accounts in our tenant; I just updated Chapter 3 of …
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